Decisions, decisions
Several weeks ago I had the chance to participate in a webinar with Jonah Lehrer, who wrote the books How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. The session was made available through my membership with the Creative Good UX Councils. The introduction to Jonah and his work from Creative Good said that “Design is partially about guiding people, offering choices, sometimes persuading them to make specific choices, or at least understand all options.” Jonah said that he started studying how people decide because he is himself pathologically indecisive – he would go to...
Read MoreThe Brand Called You
In several of my recent posts, I referenced a Tom Peters’ article in Fast Company entitled The Brand Called You. Tom Peters has been described as the best-selling business author in history, but he is perhaps most well known for his book In Search of Excellence, which he has said he wrote in response to the cookie-cutter MBA training that was the norm in the 1960s and 1970s. I read Peters’ article during the writing of my dissertation, which reflected on the ways that market discourse was being used internal to a corporation. The primary objectives of that discourse were to...
Read MoreBrand recognition
This past weekend we went to a party to celebrate the First Communion of my niece. It was a big, fun party with family and lots of family friends, and it was especially fun for me and my partner because we got to play pass-the-baby with our littlest one (Wynn), which gave us one toddler (Auden) to manage. There is nothing like adult conversation with great people to lift the spirits! Auden and I were the first ones to get a tour around the firehouse – lots of big shiny trucks! – and when we came back to the hall, Auden was thirsty. We pulled a Capri Sun from the coolers and...
Read MoreThe Daily Grommet
This year I became a member of the Creative Good UX Councils. Creative Good is a small consultancy, and (independent of their consulting work) they also offer a knowledge exchange and networking service that they call The Councils. There are about 450 people involved in total, in about 20 councils with 20-25 people each. The service includes Special Interest Groups (SIGs), a Request for Help infrastructure (RFH), and two in-person events a year tailored to the interests of each Council. They also offer a very compelling value proposition – 5x ROI on the investment, and...
Read MoreLinchpin
In early April 5th, I had the chance to participate in a free webinar with Linchpin author Seth Godin, thanks to Polar Unlimited’s service readitfor.me. Although I haven’t read the book, the webinar gave me a good feel for the book and the author. Here is what was discussed: What is a Linchpin, and why do we need them? Godin believes that in organizations worth doing business with or worth working for, each has at least one person who shows up to make a difference. In a car, the linchpin is a tiny piece of hardware that holds the wheel onto the axle of a vehicle. He has...
Read MoreEnd-user or business stakeholder?
[This is a modified version of a post I made internally on SAP's Lean Transformation blog. I've removed a few of the details about sales compensation, the process diagram, and the system screenshots.] One of the significant challenges we face in the User Experience work we do at SAP is working with business stakeholders who really feel that they know the end-users whom they represent in governing bodies, and that they can speak on behalf of those end-users. While in some cases that might be the case, I would argue that it’s the exception rather than the rule. If you read my...
Read MoreJust say no
Last year, the User Experience team that I manage at SAP really started to make a name for itself. We were involved in multiple transformation projects sponsored by the Chief Operating Officer (COO), and we began to establish relationships with several executive stakeholders who advocated for our deeper involvement in those projects. I wrote about that tipping point in January of last year. It was a long awaited, beautiful thing! In those projects, User Experience services were considered and embedded early in the project planning, which ensured that we weren’t in fire-drill mode....
Read MorePerformance of commitment
I am really starting to read in earnest again, as much as my schedule permits with the two kids and a crazy busy work life. Over the weekend I configured an RSS reader and refreshed the list of blogs I’m following. For a long time, most of the compelling blogs I was reading were related to technology trends, but I’m amazed at the proliferation of blogs by anthropologists in the past few years. It is so great to be able to skim for fresh, compelling content and not have to wait for stale irrelevant journals to appear via snail mail on my doorstep! One of the thought-provoking...
Read MoreVoice of the Customer
[As mentioned in an earlier post, SAP has embarked on a transformation journey with a focus on Lean principles. Due to the contributions of my User Experience team into several of SAP's COO-sponsored projects (COO Programs & Projects, or COO P/Ps for short), I have been invited to blog inside SAP about our journey to becoming a Lean enterprise. To the extent that confidentiality allows, I will cross-post those entries here. This is my first post to the group blog, in which I explain the synergistic relationship between Lean / Voice of the Customer and our User Experience services.]...
Read MoreMore on the iPod Touch
My two-and-a-half year old son Auden gets his share of screen time, because in addition to some time on the computer and with my iPod, he also plays Cars and Thomas the Train games on his Leapster. However, the Leapster’s entry-level games are still somewhat frustrating for him, in part because the available combination of keys, touch screen, and the pen is still a little too complex. Many times he just touches the screen with his fingers, even when the application calls for use of the little attached pointing device. Furthermore, because of the low screen resolution, the visual...
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