Are social networks driving the rebirth of the handwritten note?

I think social networks have begun to influence the offline, er, real world.

How?  Well, it may be highly anecdotal, but I have noticed a dramatic increase in notes on car windshields. One could suggest it is the holiday season what with people sharing good tidings and all, but the notes I have seen are not of the particularly friendly sort.  Here's my thinking -- as more and more people feel empowered that their opinion actually matters and must be shared, that swelling of conviction can no longer be contained within the boundaries of the Twitter or the Facebook. So wherever a social injustice may occur (or one simply has an opinion on something) people now feel they have the right -- nay the obligation -- to express their outrage. Perhaps someone could come up with a line of notepads that express generic observations, and all the user (er, person) will have to do is fill in a blank or two to contribute their thoughts and feelings.  Now that's the offline equivalent of Facebook...

And by the way, to the person who left a note on my car claiming I blocked them in, next time don't pull thru and park your SUV in front of a pile of debris, leaving a legit parking space behind you. If I only had a notepad and a time machine...

Must a user experience be "positive?"

User experience is an important dimension of software development, but it is not the entire thing. 

Sure, a "positive" user experience can increase adoption, but if the business requires things to occur in a precise way at a precise time, then the software has to enforce that, even if it means incorporating unpleasant and unnatural methods to ensure it happens exactly the way it must. 

Accomplishing this means you need to be agile in your thinking, able to see connections and intersections in new and different ways, and not be constrained by conventional thinking.

Understanding business process can create a better user experience

Software consumes, transforms and presents information. It is utterly about communication. And consumption, or capture of information, depending on the business activity supported, may be of far greater importance than how the information is represented. This is particularly true if unstructured data is feeding into the system.

As I discussed in my previous post, information simply does not have the physical or conceptual limitations of a cup holder or door knob. Thus, information design is not just about the presentation or graphical layer, but the structure as well -- data modeling, information architecture and perhaps, most important (in my experience, anyway), business process modeling, so that you have a detailed and granular understanding of the processes the user must go thru in performing a set of tasks that intersect with the software system. Process modeling helps better design the interactions and hand-offs with touch points within and outside of the system. It also helps understand the information types required, the actors involved, the constraints required by the system and the organization, additional systems or tools that are necessary, and the inputs and outputs that drive the user through to completion. 

Bottom line, the better you can understand the business and its requirements, the better and more meaningful experience you can create.

What defines a user experience practitioner?

There has been an ongoing LinkedIn thread in the User Experience (UX) group regarding just what defines a user experience practitioner. This is something that I have noodled as well as I have tried to determine what my last decade as a software entrepreneur has turned me into (professionally, at least). Of the many hats I have worn, ideation, prototyping, interaction and interface design and user testing has been the most interesting and personally satisfying, but does that make me a UX expert?  The LinkedIn thread leads me to believe there are two distinct groups, the traditional practitioners who come from industrial design, architecture, etc., and digital practitioners, who are more visually inclined. Certainly I am more of the latter, tho with a strong foundation in marketing fundamentals and keen knowledge of business process methods, both of which I think are additional strengths for effective digital UX design.

Anyway, I thought I'd share my recent contribution to the conversation as it describes a key notion of mine regarding software design and user interaction, which is the ability to achieve greater clarity of purpose by freeing yourself from constraints and rules:

"I have been following this conversation for some time, and I think a key distinction between these two UX camps is that one is governed by immutable rules, and the other is not.  User experience in the real world, as defined by architects, industrial designers, etc., is constrained by reality -- things like gravity, friction, mass, and so on.  The digital user experience is constrained by none of these things. In fact I would make the case that the more the real world intrudes on the digital experience, the more it is potentially diminished. Just because a physical object is known for a specific purpose does not necessarily make it the best metaphor to represent a vaguely similar action.

And as much as I respect the deep training UX demands in the real world, perhaps that same training, when applied to a primarily visual experience, is detrimental when it comes with so much psychological and creative baggage. Artists, on the other hand, excel at imagining possibilities without constraint. The beauty of the web and web toolsets are that they provide an easy way for artists to realize their ideas without making too many compromises. This is not to say anything should go, but it is always easier to scale back big ideas than to take a small idea and make it more than it is.

Certainly a balance of both skill sets would be optimal, but moving quickly and being good enough for the medium is going to win most of the time."

The era of the perpetual job seeker?

Over the last several decades, the level of trust between employee and employer has corroded.  While there are many causes for this decline, the bottom line is most employers no longer hesitate to slash employees, and most employees do not hesitate to jump ship for better opportunities. And each party is fully aware of the other's intent.

So what does this mean for average Joes like you and me?

It means that your employer is going to continually look for new and exciting ways to squeeze productivity out of you (more on this to come soon).

And it means you are going to have to change from the traditional passive model of "job hunting when necessity strikes" to being ever vigilant and alert for new opportunities.

First, the easy part -- get your personal "brand" polished and ready to go at a moment's notice. At the moment, LinkedIn seems the be the primary mechanism to do this, tho other social media matter as well.  Whether you use Facebook or Twitter or some other site, these social media outlets need to collectively communicate your strengths, and hopefully few of your weaknesses.

Second, you need to find ways to always be on the lookout for that next gig. This is the real challenge -- traditional job posting web sites like Monster or Careerbuilder are tiresome to wade thru, as is Craigslist (which seems to be on the wane from its glory days as a job site) and newspaper sites. LinkedIn appears to have the lead here, but other than using your network to suggest connections, technologically it is not particularly interesting.

Jobfox is little more interesting in their approach. Sure, they have job postings as well, but you use your resume to build a profile on which the site performs an automated categorization of your skills.  This enables Jobfox to recommend jobs that you might not find on your own as the title, keywords, or details may be different from the kind of job you would normally search for. Of course, when you automate categorization it is rarely 100% (for example, my profile came back with Linux, which was not on my resume, as a skill -- and while I can fat finger my way around VI, I am by no means proficient).

A way to make the categorization more effective is by applying semantic technology. Being able to eliminate options that are in the wrong context increases the overall quality of the associations.  And the ability to mine for non-obvious associations provides insight into opportunities that would have remained hidden.

Bottom line, whatever the technology, being able to have relevant, quality, networked opportunities delivered to you as they occur will certain help you prosper in the era of the perpetual job seeker.

Twitter, the first ten days.

I tried to stay away. Really, I swear I simply am not that keen on sharing 140 character thoughts, notions and witticisms...but frankly, for better or worse, it appears that one is increasingly considered out of touch technologically if one is not tweeting, blogging and doing whatever the hell it is you do on Facebook. Particularly if you are in marketing, which certainly is part of what I do. So I got a Twitter account recently, and have been gently dipping my toes in the swirling chaos of millions of little thoughts.

A few observations:

At first I was puzzled why so many tweets were in initial caps. What was it about writing a tweet that inspired tweet authors to write like journalists of old with screaming headlines? Um, nothing, it turns out. The truth came to me when I decided to comment on an article from the New York Times -- most sites "prompt" you to tweet by offering the headline as tweet.  How thoughtful -- should I not care to craft a witty insight of my own I can just use what they provide. Easy!

Second, I was fascinated by the number of folks who always appeared to looking off the side (generally the viewer's right, so as to look as tho they are gazing lovingly at their tweet). This particularly seemed to be the case for what appeared to be professional, or business folk. This in fact inspired one of my early tweets, which I will repeat here (which is the point, isn't it?):

"New study shows 3 out of 4 twitter users unable to stare directly at camera."

Still makes me giggle.

Now, here's the thing I still don't really get -- most tweeting is simply retransmitting what smarter, more informed people have already written elsewhere. And generally, as noted above, with little added insight, other than reinforcing whatever beliefs that person already has.  Which is fine, I guess, but certainly makes much noise to filter thru, especially if you follow people with similar interests, as they are all tweeting and retweeting the same damn thing. 

What Twitter has motivated me to do is seek out people who are amply capable of making witty and clever statements worth reading. So far I have found Sarah Silverman to be worth reading, as well as The Onion (whose use of initial caps is perfectly acceptable).  Admittedly, I have not sought out too many others yet, but I am saddened (but respect them even more) by those who have chosen not to tweet, like John Waters (just the film maker from Baltimore, please) -- but I bet if he did they'd be particularly clever.

On a final note, it appears the dead are prolific tweeters.  Kurt Vonnegut has been active lately (and kudos to him, he only chooses to "follow" one single person -- Mark Twain), and you know what, when his writing is broken down into snippets and doled out one at a time -- it really works, but only because he was such a damn good writer in the first place.

When business process, semantics and search collide

As more and more server and desktop applications migrate to the cloud, there is great opportunity to take old, worn metaphors and functionality and re-invent them in lighter, faster, more usable ways.  A few search vendors are already preparing for this evolution by offering architectures and tool sets to build these applications -- Exalead offers a smart take on what they call search-based applications, or SBAs, and Google just announced a business version of their App Engine. And I am sure that others will soon follow.

But something important is missing:

A business process is usually baked, or hard coded, into the application that supports it (with a slight amount of configuration tolerated), so the challenge has always been how to tie disparate applications together into a unique, business-required flow. For example, a process may flow from the SFA app to a pricing spreadsheet to a CRM app, but there is no common connector other than the process or expertise.

Sure, BPM and workflow software can sometimes do this, but it is expensive, complex, time consuming to implement and ultimately only works for processes and flows that are precise and reoccurring. They do little to support "knowledge" or ad hoc processes. And certainly traditional BPM/workflow systems do not offer the kind of flexibility and usability that can fully leverage the benefits of the cloud.

So who can effectively bring a business process sensibility to the cloud and search-based apps? It's a good question, as process folks are too rigid to accept the ad hoc nature of search, and search folks will not like the structure and rules that process requires to be successful. But whoever figures it out will have a killer platform.

The key to this convergence, by the way, will be semantic technology. Think of it this way --  business process, at its essence, is simply a set of rules around how around how words are displayed and connected. The purpose, of course, is so that individuals within a group can come to agreement as to what it is they do, should do or want to do, and agreement to the methods they will use.

I'd like to walk through a example that may provide some insight on how process could be effectively incorporated into search applications.

Let's begin with a simple, traditional process model. What this says, basically, is since a birthday is occurring (the input), there is a need to bake a cake (the activity).  A baker (or actor) will follow a recipe (a guideline or rule), using available ingredients (material) and an oven (a tool or system) to produce a cake (output). This process could be decomposed into its parts, or sub-activities, such as "Select Recipe," "Purchase Needed Ingredients," "Make Batter," and so on.

Traditionally, this representation would be used for reference (here's how we prefer to do it), or it could be automated into a workflow (you cannot bake a cake unless you have a birthday occurring within the next two days).  But try looking at it like this:

Each component of the process is really just a part of a larger entity or repository of common types, that in the case of baking a cake, happen to fit together like this. Certainly each component can play many different roles at different times. This notion of a distributed process environment is exactly what will work in the cloud. Process definitions become metadata and fuel for rich semantic queries that can tap multiple repositories when needed, retrieving and assembling components on demand into an interface that is meaningful to a user at a precise point in time.

What's cool about this is a business process can be enabled from many places -- from a document, from an email, from a user profile on a social network.  Since any component of any process is aware of its role across many processes, users are able to engage in typical ad hoc behavior but will always be a click away from greater process rigor should they want it or the business require it.

This also means that the ability to "model" or define a process needs to fast, easy and human, something most BPM and workflow tools most definitely are not.

Mediocrity of the crowds

Everyone may have a fundamental right to an opinion, but that doesn't mean they know what the heck they are talking about. And put enough of these people together, and well, welcome to the internet, 2010. Loud, anonymous and opinionated with little substance. Credibility and expertise be damned.

While the touted benefits of the hive mind help rationalize this embracing of mediocrity, it in fact makes it even harder to discover information of substance and value as the outliers, both superior and inferior, get clumped together as they are not of the "norm."

Practically speaking, this makes it harder to know what new books to read, what new music may be of interest, or if a movie or play is worth seeing. Not to mention the utter lack of meaningful serendipity. It is not for lack of opinions, but for lack of quality, substantive opinions. While the internet has made it exceptionally easy to solicit and contribute feedback or post one's grandest or most heart-felt insights to a blog (ouch), there is absolutely no guarantee the thoughts shared are of any value whatsoever. And even if there are postings of substance you may simply never find them, having to first wade thru dozens or hundreds of rants and ramblings.

A real problem with this clumping together of outliers is that it also makes it much more challenging to discover things that may be loosely but not directly of interest. Sure Amazon and Google can tell you what has occurred in the past (people who liked this bought that...), but they are lousy at predicting the future because it's, well, unpredictable.

The answer? Well, for as long as they are around, the best resources are still the traditional media, where people are directly compensated to articulate critical thoughts. Skilled writers and reviewers with years of expertise in specific domains. While one may not always agree with their opinions, there is at least respect for the wisdom applied. And by being trusted sources, they enable readers to make discoveries and connections that software simply cannot know to make.

The best advice I can give a first time entrepreneur

You will not get venture funding. Stop wasting your time. If you can't come up with an idea that leads directly to paying customers, go get a job. Do not max out your credit cards, do not borrow from friends and family.

The truth is, if this is your first venture, and you have never raised capital before, you will not get funding. While it is especially true today, it was mostly true since the bubble burst. Now, VCs will not tell you this as they like to stay relevant and informed and will indeed take meetings to learn about you. And of course, they are happy to offer all kinds of advice. But do not let them give you hope – they will not ever consider investing in you, at least not until you have more than proven yourself (and no, not one or two customers, but many, and much revenue).

Now ask yourself, do you have the resources to build your product, get someone to buy it the first time (and by buy, I mean pay enough to sustain you, not a token fee for a “pilot”), and stay afloat long enough until that next sale comes along? No? Then forget enterprise software. You'd probably fail anyway, big businesses tend to be risk adverse and rely on trusted relationships. So unless you have a partnership with IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, etc., you'll never close a deal (tho they will waste much of your time as they too are curious about new technology – they just won't buy it from you).

So what's left? How about software as a service? If you're a geek with a good idea (like solving a problem small businesses may have but they cannot afford to hire an FTE to manage), then building a cloud/subscription based service could give you a way to bootstrap. Tho if you are a geek you may not be particularly savvy at sales and marketing. But hell, you can figure out that stuff by reading a book. Watch out for small business marketing consultants and specialists. If they were any good at what they did they would be charging top dollar working for big businesses. Actually, that advice applies anyone who wants to “help” you, particularly if it involves retainers. They can be expensive and distracting, and rarely produce.

So, to summarize – if you really feel you have to start your own venture, save up, aim small, and expect to fail, tho you will learn much along the way. Good luck!

The possible business benefits of social networks

I have to admit I have been slow to find value in social networks and social media, particularly in a business context. Sure, I've tried Facebook, but I closed the account after I decided I simply did not care enough about the comings and goings, minute-by-minute activities and phone-enabled orgy of idiotic imagery (for example, the image here shows a foul baseball that landed just under the front passenger side of my car, hit by my 11 year old last night at the little league playoffs (they won, BTW) -- without my iPhone, this magical memory would be lost forever) of people I had not seen in person in years, and frankly have little in common with anymore.

Same for Twitter -- I have enough frequent, brief thoughts of my own to organize and evaluate I don't need them crowded out by the pithy musings of others, nor am I needy enough to really believe I am doing a disservice to humanity at large and hindering the advancement of intellectual discourse by not instantly sharing my every thought. That's what blogs are for, which are only slightly better in that they allow for the all-too-often unused capability to produce multiple drafts.

Now, LinkedIn I do use frequently, but less for interaction with others and more for research. And the more features they add, the less interesting it becomes to me as it just creates more visual noise.

Which leads me to the enterprise.  While many people are keen on the benefits of social media within business, I have been much less so.  Businesses exist to produce goods and services for less than the market will bear.  Social networks are distracting, and combined with other distracting technologies like email and phones, it seems to be more counter productive than not.

But here's the thing, whether I like it of not. Social media and networks can be fun and engaging. And if people engage, they contribute.

This has been the classic challenge in knowledge management. Just because you install software to enable a "Community of Practice" does not mean people will contribute. And those who do may not be the ones you really need, as the people who are really good at their jobs are generally busy doing their jobs, and have little time for anything else.

Another approach has been to hide rewards within a system to encourage users to explore it, but that tends to encourage the people who like to find things and get rewarded, and have the time on their hands to do so.  Which, again, are most likely not the people who excel at revenue producing activities.

Social media may be different.

Social media, if woven into the work flow and processes, could bridge the gap so that knowledge capture is thorough, useful and painless. But it will need to be guided and managed to truly be successful.

The big lie in search

The biggest lie in search is also its most touted benefit -- that it is intuitive and easy to use.

Perhaps, as much as a blank piece of paper is intuitive, so too can be a single, empty text box partnered with a single submit button.

But the search results page? Easy and intuitive, it never has been, and it is getting worse and worse as search companies keep adding more options, suggestions, clusters, facets and widgets to try and help you make sense of the endless pages of results. Even the Google with its once pristine layout recently felt compelled to add more clutter to the interface, an explicit acknowledgement that the results they serve up simply are not good enough.

So how could the search experience be improved?

One way is to make the results better by asking just a little more of the searcher up front. If you are able to ask the right questions, you can infer much. For example, if, instead of a single submit button, suppose there were three; "animal," "vegetable," and "mineral." By forcing the user to select, huge amounts of ambiguous results could be eliminated. Of course, this approach impacts the simple, intuitive search box and button combo myth, but if the experience and results are better, does it really matter?

Another approach is to build applications and interfaces that integrate rules to constrain search queries to a specific business purpose or process. To quote from a patent currently pending (um, mine):

"This invention relates generally to software-based search technology, and particularly to rules-based (rules being any standardized set of principles or methods for organizing and structuring information (e.g. The AP Style Manual; IDEF, a business process language; the Marquess of Queensberry rules for boxing) searching via a constrained or guided query structure."

 You can read the full patent here should you be interested.

Bottom line -- attributing the property of "intuitive" to a text box forces a free-for-all environment that must cast too far and too wide, and demands far too much processing on the backend in the attempt to guess at user intent.  Constraining the queries, either by empowering the user or by integrating them into the user experience, can more easily deliver better, more relevant information.

Fun and games with disambiguation

One of the coolest things I have learned in the last few years is the notion of disambiguation, a linguist's term for determining the right meaning of a word within a specific context. My current favorite example to illustrate this is:

This is important, as not knowing which meaning of “manhattan" is being referenced, whether in a search query or in piece of content, can really impact how well algorithms can leverage words. While my interests are currently focused on automated query building, certainly there are many, many interesting things that can be done when proper word definitions are known. Here's an example from our experimental search engine, howdoya.com on how to mix a manhattan. Note all the useful words on the left you can use to refine your query -- disambiguation! Now, if you want to see something really interesting, click on the x-ray glasses next to each search result -- again, disambiguation! A world of possibilities.

Would you pay for great search results?

In our experiments at Emantix with automating search queries, we discovered something really curious -- the longer and richer the query, more often than not the top result was very, very good. But the following results were not -- at all.  In fact, in our experimental search engine, howdoya.com, we had to tune down the richness of the query so that, at a glance, the entire results page looked good, giving the user an overall perception of quality.  And of course, when we tested with organically occurring ads, the same was true. Really great queries -- fewer, if any, ads, mediocre queries -- more ads.

So the question is, do more relevant search results diminish the quantity and quality of ads displayed? And if so, what are the implications of and opportunities in removing the obligations inherent in a paid advertising revenue model?

Why not an ad-free, fee-based search engine?  A low annual fee that is painless to an individual, but collectively, on a web-scale, could be a highly profitable enterprise?

Would you pay a nominal fee for better results and less visual clutter?

I would like to propose a word, a verb, to describe this opportunity  -- to "craigslist" -- or to disrupt an entire industry by eliminating a critical source of revenue.

NYTimes: Text without context

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html

Really good article on the challenges facing online content and media, as well as the impact of those challenges on, well, all of us. The handful of books referenced seem worthwhile as well, I have already read Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" and I highly recommend it.

The fundamental human benefit of the Web

As a follow up to the previous posting:

The Web empowers individuals to rapidly achieve innovations while reducing dependencies and removing barriers.

And while this may not encourage "team spirit," what it does do is free innovators, creators and thinkers to move at speeds previously unimagined. No longer constrained by middle managers who covet information as means of consolidating power; weighed down and slowed down by forced collaboration with mediocre performers (when was the last time you were in a brainstorming session where no one played devil's advocate and everyone offered real ideas and suggestions without fear of being ridiculed?); managed by superiors who either claim credit for efforts not their own or who claim vast improvements of quality by making trivial changes, the Web removes market boundaries, provides access to highly skilled but reasonably-priced resources, and allows for entire companies and brands to be built overnight merely by creating a well designed, thoughtful and information-rich online presence.

Now this may lead to more frequent job changes for these folks, expected or unexpected, but in the long run, a small price to pay for great leaps in innovation.

There is another risk — just because something is innovative is no guarantee that anyone will want it enough to pay for it. But I'll save that topic for another day.

The fundamental business benefit of the Web

It empowers the individual while reducing the burden on the enterprise.

Fundamental to the World Wide Web is the ability to provide anyone anywhere instant access to information, processes, tools and resources. This empowers individuals by helping them learn more quickly; think faster on their feet; improvise, improve and produce better results; and generally be more productive and self-sufficient.

And, while the same information, processes, tools and resources are accessed by many different people over time, the cost to the enterprise to define and disseminate occurs only once. And, once processes, information and resources are captured, organized and distributed, the enterprise can operate more efficiently — and more profitably.

Free the desktop!

While virtualization is all the rage, making your word processor, spreadsheet and other day-to-day tools “virtual” still ain't solving your big problem. While your TCO can certainly be brought down, you aren't going to get a corresponding or greater return on productivity.

A brief history:

In the beginning, the application or program was the primary point of entry for the user. Then, as users installed more and more applications on their desktops (which begat more and more files), the file became the primary means for entry – click the file and the OS generally knew which program to launch. Today, we are in a hybrid environment of desktop apps, network client/server apps, files and URLs/URIs that connect to networked or remote hosted applications. And lets not forget "the cloud."

The problem with the desktop is simply that it is the wrong metaphor for the distributed enterprise. And, as illustrated by the floppy disk that represents “save,” software companies are loath to change “learned” metaphors. Great leaps are only made by taking risks (or at the very least stepping outside your comfort zone).

So how do you build a better desktop? By reinventing how you interact with business content and business process. Business process can provide a crystal clear lens into the enterprise that reflects and communicates exactly what an employee could, should or must do.

Imagine:

No matter where you are, or what device you are using (laptop, smart phone, kiosk, toaster), you log into your “workspace,” where you see the processes and tasks that define your job. As each task is selected, the relevant content, regulations and policies, subject matter experts and yes, the software systems, are exposed. Clicking on any one of them links to, contacts, or logs you into that thing. You in turn print, download or upload work files, enter data and collaborate with peers.

Bottom line – while virtualization is not solving the productivity puzzle, it certainly does provide some critical, enabling pieces. But the rest, well, is yet to come.

The imperative to reinvent business process

Why am I so keen on the idea of reinventing business process?

Because an amazing thing happens when an enterprise's business processes leverage the distributed nature of the Web.

Productivity...increases.

Unfortunately, this is not what traditional business process methods, tools and techniques were created to enable. Originally, they were developed to do essentially two things – one, to analyze how an organization operates and determine areas for improvement (which might or might not have resulted in a technology implementation); and two, identify resource types and definitions so that database schemas could be designed. Thus the tools created to do this are generally expensive and complicated, with steep learning curves. And the result, or output of these tools are diagrams either too large and complex to comprehend, or so granular and precise that they fail to communicate any understanding of, or relationship to, the enterprise as a whole.

For an enterprise to see dramatic productivity gains, the tools to do so must be in the hands of, and usable by, the business user – the person actually doing the work.

So what about business process needs reinventing? Four things:

1. Anyone should be able to document, or model, a business process with little or no training.
   
2. Anyone should be able to use the result, or representation, of a documented process to navigate the tasks and activities that define their role within the organization.
   
3. The documented process should directly connect process activities to all relevant content.
   
4. Human interactions with a process should act as feedback into the process, either validating it or indicating areas for improvement.