I came across this video demo of a digital magazine prototype on Popular Science and was ultra impressed. Hat tip to the developers in Bonnier’s R&D group and BERG Design for their work on this. This year we’ve seen escalating hype around ebook readers like Amazon’s Kindle, as well as a lot of speculation about the looming death of print media, so it’s great to get a sneak peak at what designers are coming up with in the digital realm. The team responsible for this prototype has obviously put a lot of thought into what creates successful digital reading experiences and the demo of what they’ve produced clearly shows that converting a magazine to a screen won’t necessarily rob us of what we love most about magazines. Most importantly, perhaps, is that you can see how much space for innovation and creativity there is in the magazine space. This should give magazine lovers an industrial strength shot of optimism in the arm…
It takes about 30 seconds to realize that this product is a perfect marriage between digital and analog. The interface is simple, and the story telling is rich and engaging. What a fantastic way to bring together parents and children. Not only does it encourage reading, it also inspires creativity.
This video was originally posted on Alex Rainert‘s blog EverydayUX – one of the best blogs on the web for user experience design lovers. Hat tip to Alex for the find. Head over there for more info and links about the product.
I get a kick out of this Intel commercial every time I see it. Geeky? Sure. But it’s brilliant. It doesn’t just tell us that Intel values people with innovative ideas, it encourages us all to rethink what kinds of people should be worthy of rockstar status in our organizations.
Of course, this commercial is funny precisely because we don’t expect people to be falling over themselves to get Ajay Bhatt’s autograph, but maybe if more organizations made the effort to celebrate star performers on a regular basis it wouldn’t seem so abnormal…
What does your organization do to celebrate it’s own Rockstars?
In this presentation, Christina Wodtke (LinkedIn) shares some core principals for creating online communities, and discusses critical design decisions that help a community thrive. I flipped through it this morning and found it useful. It provides a good framework for learning about and discussing how to promote desired behaviors with interface design, and provides some good examples of who’s doing it right. Some notable principals that Christina highlights are:
Kollocks’ 4 Motivations for Contributing: Reciprocity, reputation, increased sense of efficacy and attachment to an need of a group
B=f(P+E) – Behavior is a function of a Person and his Environment
The importance of the esteem layer in Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs
The AOF Method – Defining your Activity, Identifying your Social Objects and Choosing your Features
Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think and business as usual needs a new system of operating that’s more closely aligned with human nature. That’s Dan Pinks argument in a nutshell, and I think his case is strong. For those of you with some time, I’d highly recommend watching the full video. For those of you with only a few minutes, I’ve highlighted some of the main takeaways below. Enjoy.
The Three Elements Of The New Operating System
In this TED talk, Dan argues that there’s a mismatch between what scientists know about motivation and how businesses today reward their workers, and that if we look closely at the data gathered from studies on what truly motivates people it’s clear that we need a new paradigm. Here are some of the best nuggets…He says:
“…too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science…if we really want high performance on those definitional (cognitive) tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things. To entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach
….the scientists who’ve been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It’s an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they’re interesting, because they are part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
(1.) Autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives.
(2.) Mastery – the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
(3.) Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.”
After presenting the findings of studies performed by leading scientists and economists at the London School of Economics, Dan sites some examples of how this new work paradigm is being put into practice in leading firms:
Worker Autonomy, 20 Percent Time and Innovation
“20 Percent Time…Done, famously, at Google. Where engineers can spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Okay? Radical amounts of autonomy, And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20 Percent Time. Things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News.”
Results Only Work Environments (ROWE)
“…an even more radical example…something called the Results Only Work Environment. The ROWE. Created by two American consultants, in place at about a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional.”
What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down.
I find myself coming back to nuggets on Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner frequently. These two, taken together, are like a motivational one-two punch if you’ve got entrepreneurship in your blood. Randy is right on the money. In the first video, he warns against the concept of a deferred life plan, when people put off what they really want to do for what is expected of them. He says that deferring life is when you are deferring your sense of excitement and passion for what you really care about and points out that working hard is not inconsistent with the deferred life plan, but doing so for a product that you do not have interest in is.
In the second video Randy points out that most entrepreneurship in the world is not mission-driven, but inspired by necessity and he challenges the audience with the idea that fostering a strong culture of entrepreneurship can provide a surrogate notion of empowerment and democracy (that we are lacking). So what do you love to do? Wanna change the world? What are you waiting for?
A Cautionary Word on the Deferred Life Plan
Embracing A Value Driven Culture of Entrepreneurship
In this keynote on Constructive Capitalism, Umair Haque reminds us that not all profits are equal. While some truly innovative companies are creating authentic “thick value” in the economy, others create profit through economic harm to others that results in “thin value” and (what he calls) a “zombieconomy”. How thick is the value you are creating?
This video was created for VINT, the International Research Institute of Sogeti. For more information please visit the following websites Methemedia or http://vint.sogeti.nl. You can also contact duivestein directly. For those of you that don’t have 45 minutes to watch the keynote, here’s a quick synopsis of the video’s content. Read More
We’ve got a talent problem. We’ve got too many brilliant marketers getting us to love stuff. Somehow they’ve gotten us to buy into this formula: bigger, better, shinier, more expensive stuff = self-esteem. Being the self-esteem seeking creatures that we are, we consume gratefully. The issue is that it’s not doing us much good.
In Small Is The New Big, Seth Godin points out exactly why the side effects of great branding is a problem that needs fixing, and why we should worry that (as he puts it) “the unintended consequences of excellent branding…is one of the great tragedies of [the marketing] profession”. He says -
I think when traditional marketers talk about “brand”, self-esteem value is what they mean. A true brand is something where the self esteem value far exceeds the utility. It might be Heinz ketchup or a Rolex watch or a Marlboro cigarette, but in each case there’s a truly emotional connection between the brand and the user….It might be Timberland boots downtown, or Prada bags uptown. Both are ridiculously overpriced for the utility they deliver, but it’s the story we tell ourselves that matters, the label, the image, the peace of mind.
The problem, of course, is that the values and the messages that are selling us the promise of peace of mind are also leading us astray, and there’s no way to market our way out of the problem. Or is there?
