This week it seems I have been collecting articles that actually relate to my job, which is increasingly rare these days. The fact it is half year review time and our team is going through some organisational changes I am sure has not had a subconscious impact on my reading of choice. A heady mix of innovation stuff, organisational working attitudes and styles, Google’s attempts to become a real enterprise software provider, the failure of platform thinking at Facebook, two interviews with innovators (innovatorviews?), dark UX patterns and what happens when you test the prisoner’s dilemma with actual prisoners (not obviously work related although maybe it is). Read them and be ready for your appraisal…sort of.<\/p>\n
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In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we\u2019ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, \u201cturnkey\u201d solutions to the major difficulties of the world\u2014hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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Stop Backing Visionaries<\/a><\/h3>\n
…if you examine the births of the most successful consumer internet companies, you\u2019ll quickly realize that initial product and \u201cvision\u201d are flawed criteria.\u00a0More often than not, founders, early employees, and investors of the largest tech companies will tell you that the product that took off was never part of (at least not fully) the original \u201cplan.\u201d Twitter spun out of Odeo, Instagram was a Burbn pivot, BuzzFeed evolved from one of many \u201cfor fun\u201d experiments?\u2014?the list goes on and on.\u00a0By and large, innovative products aren\u2019t strategically imagined ahead of time \u2013 they\u2019re stumbled upon while experimenting on-the-go.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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What gets done is what gets done<\/a><\/h3>\n
The opposite of the work hero is the person on the team who has kids. Well, they\u2019re probably more of a hero than the work hero, but that\u2019s another story. They do good work, they\u2019re prompt, professional, committed and they\u2019ve got experience.\u00a0The trouble is, that if you have work-heroes around, you\u2019re bound to have a nasty moment where the people who just can\u2019t work late or drop weekends to satisfy the heroic workload pattern end up looking like they\u2019re slacking or are uncommitted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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To Do to Done: Jank \u2018n\u2019 Drank<\/a><\/h3>\n
According to Ford, who came close to dubbing the Tuesday night sessions Work \u2018n\u2019 Twerk,\u201djank\u201d is a very specific category: \u201cLong-standing bugs, slightly broken user experiences, processes that could be automated or improved, visual imperfections in the product, development environment annoyances, hacky code that\u2019s on the verge of causing that one bug, again, and other tasks clinging to the bottom of a to-do list.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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The sad story of Platform, Facebook\u2019s gigantic missed opportunity<\/a><\/h3>\n
Today, just after its sixth birthday, Facebook Platform is a shadow of what it could have been, a missed opportunity that might amount to tens of billions of dollars of squandered revenue. Outside of games, there has been no killer Facebook app. Other than Zynga, you\u2019ll struggle to name a single business that has built itself entirely inside the Facebook framework. Once-promising startups Slide and iLike would ultimately abandon their big bets on the platform, selling to Facebook rivals Google and MySpace for amounts smaller than their one-time valuations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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Google wants to own enterprise, but it\u2019ll do it Google style<\/a><\/h3>\n
Petlon didn\u2019t want end users to perceive that this new technology was being jammed down their throats, so nothing was taken away and growth toward Google Apps was organic. If users wanted to use an Outlook client to access the Gmail back end, they could. Two years in now Petlon estimates that 90 percent or more users are happy Googlers. Collaboration using Google Apps probably doubles every month, he estimates, and having to use Microsoft Word documents with \u201ctrack changes\u201d turned on feels as old school as getting a fax.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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IFTTT Puts the Internet of things in your pocket<\/a><\/h3>\n
“But with the Internet, there’s no common understanding,” he continued. “There are things everyone gets like email or hyperlinks, but there’s still this lack of concrete rules. Could that cause-and-effect thing be turned into one of these fundamental rules? How do we productize that? How do we make this available with an interface anyone could use? What are some of those other rules that might exist?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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Interview with\u00a0Jane N\u00ed Dhulchaointigh, inventor and CEO of Sugru<\/a><\/h3>\n
One night, I was giving myself a really hard time and my boyfriend, James, brought me into the kitchen and pointed out all the humble little solutions I had done. He said, \u201cWhat if it\u2019s not you that\u2019s the creative person, and what if it\u2019s not one perfect design or solution? What if this could be a humble, handy household product thateveryone<\/em>\u00a0could use to make their things better?\u201d Suddenly, it was about everyone\u2019s potential; users know why things don\u2019t work, from the teapot that doesn\u2019t pour properly to the shoe that\u2019s really uncomfortable. That was a real light bulb moment for me. I saw this huge potential and everything clicked. I thought that if I could make it simple enough and attractive enough, then millions of people could use it\u2014I felt very sure from the start that it had the potential to be something universal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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The slippery slope<\/a><\/h3>\n
So how would you react when your boss says to you that you have to cut wait times to under 5 minutes per patient or you\u2019re fired. Just think about this for a moment. You\u2019ve got no spare capital, no spare staff time, no way to stretch your resources. How can you possibly do this?\u00a0Well here\u2019s a little idea. How about you create a job role for a nurse where their job is simply to say hello to new patients. Nothing more. That way the patients are seen to, that way the wait time problem is solved. You get to keep your job. Sounds devious \u2013 but this really happened throughout the NHS in the 90s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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They Finally Tested The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ On Actual Prisoners \u2014 And The Results Were Not What You Would Expect<\/a><\/h3>\n
In sequential games, where players know each other\u2019s previous behaviour and have the opportunity to punish each other, defection is the dominant strategy as well. \u00a0However, on a Pareto basis, the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation.\u00a0Yet no one\u2019s ever actually run the experiment on real prisoners before, until\u00a0two University of Hamburg economists\u00a0tried it out in a recent study comparing the behaviour of inmates and students.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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Bonus Aden Link i.e. blatant inclusion of my own writing.<\/p>\n
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Six Little Fields<\/a><\/h3>\n
I assume that most people who own financial services products, be they current accounts, credit cards, loans, savings, insurance etc. do not have them all from the same organisation. Even though I work for a bank, and I should probably whisper this, I do not have all my products with that organisation. This is of course the benefit of a free market, competition and choice, which is a fantastic thing. The big issue from my point of view is what is known in the banking industry as single customer view i.e. the ability to see your full financial picture in one nice shiny interface. This is not a new problem in the industry it is also something I have written about before, but it is one that seems far from being solved or even on any of the banks to do list.<\/p>\n
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Enjoy the rest of your Friday. Feel free to subscribe to these reads via\u00a0email<\/a>\u00a0or via the much cooler (and more content filled) RSS\u00a0here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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