Front to back

From the Nussbaum on Design blog at Business Week...

"...thinking about it in terms of "one-off" innovation (get me another iPod> quick!) doesn't make your company innovative. But thinking about The Discipline of Innovation--and what that implies in terms of building a culture and organization--does."

Absolutely! Brilliant innovations don't just appear from nowhere. They can only grow in environments that support and encourage innovation.

You also need a culture that understands what worthwhile innovation really is. One interesting viewpoint:

"The only worthwhile innovation is a profitable innovation."

This is from Payback, a book by some clever folk at BGC. And there's a lot to be said for it. (Though there are some very worthwhile government and humanitarian services which are not profitable, surely).

The book talks about the "cash curve", the S-shaped curve of cumulative cash spent or earned during the course of an innovation project. The curve dips below zero to start with, as you invest in the project, then, ideally, rockets above zero as sales of your product or service takes off. Except that for many projects, it never makes it back above zero, but bumbles along in the red, requiring an endless stream of further investment to keep it alive.

Successful products usually need a large volume of sales before they achieve payback. So the key factor, they point out, is not time to market - it's time to volume.

This is great ammunition for supporters of user-centred design (UCD). Organisations that understand they are trying to reach high volume need to invest in customer satisfaction - making sure their product is easy to use and fits with customer needs. In other words, they should do UCD.

UCD is about taking a longer term view. It's about selecting the right projects based on an understanding of user needs. And it's about not just getting the product out the door, but getting the right product out of the door, even if it takes a bit longer. That way, the cash curve doesn't flat-line in the longer term.

So there we are. Yet more evidence to support the UCD case: UCD reduces your time to volume.

BBC News says that Dell are going to start shipping consumer desktops with Ubuntu linux on them. For ordinary people to use.

I think this is cool because the geek in my loves unix and the dad in me has no time to actually configure unix boxes to do useful things.
But it made me think: I'm not actually interested in cutting edge products and fads. I'm interested in the stuff that lasts, and that the early majority or even the later majority can adopt. As someone clever said at a conference once: "Getting a video call on your mobile is cool. Getting a video call from your mum really shows that technology is having an impact."

So if you're reading ths blog looking for the latest insight into cutting edge technology, you're in the wrong place. This blog is all about the stuff that makes it, or should be making it, across the chasm and over the adoption curve.

(For an explanation of all this curve and chasm malarkey, see the Wikipedia page about it).

We're house hunting in South Africa at the moment and we've tried just about every property website there is. We've seen some shockers, and we've been surprised by some very good, usable web design.

When you compare the best performer with the worst offenders, it does highlight how making your website usable really is a very good idea if you want to deliver a worthwhile return on your investment.

Compare these search engine interfaces from the the homepages of...

1. PropertyGenie

2. Remax

Ask yourself a simple question: How quickly can you work out what to do with interface number 1? And what about number 2?

Quite.

Ah, Remax. Why are some suburbs in dark blue with [All] written next to them? What is the suburb filter box for? Will you remember to hold down CTRL to select multiple suburbs? Which parts of step 2 will light up when? What "payment type" will you select - can you pay in bushelss of corn?

The Remax functionality is all good. Those are all criteria that users might want to filter by at some point. But most people won't want to set most of those criteria most of the time. And providing a huge control panel to let people do all that stuff at the beginning is just bewildering and off-putting for most normal house hunters.

A couple of key lessons that good designers have known for years:

1. Don't ask people to set search scope before when they are entering their search query. If people want to search for something, let them type it in and see how many results there are. Then when the necessity of narrowing the search becomes apparent, people will feel motviated to go to the trouble of doing so. Proprty Genie gets this right. A simple search first, supported with solid geaopgraphical data that matched my desired suburb on the first attempt. Then simple filtering controls that get shown after you've seen the initial search results.

2. Make easy things easy and difficult things possible. In other words, design for the main things that people want to do and make those things very, very easy. Then add the "edge case" functionality in low priority places where it won't clutter things up.

Remax have put up an interface that ignores these two basic interaction design patterns. And as a result, I'm sure they are missing out on a lot of traffic and a lot of business. There's a lesson for every website owner in there somewhere.

Property Genie goes on do display some fairly usable sort controls too.

These controls show you (a) that you can sort and (b) what you can sort by. Nice. (I'm struggling to tell which radio butotn goes with which label though).
If Property Genie granted me three wishes, though, I'd ask for larger property pictures and a click through to the agent's own site for more details.

The third wish would be a lovely villa on Clifton Beach. But that's another story.

Behind the curve as ever, I read about Andrew Keen and his "anti-web2.0" stance in the Observer. Thanks, also to Matt Buckland, for pointing me at it.

"The author and entrepreneur has stunned his adopted country with a book that accuses bloggers and other evangelists for the web of destroying culture, ruining livelihoods and threatening to make consumers of new media regress into 'digital narcissism'."

I think Mr Keen is doing well at generating PR and that'll make sure he sells lots of copies of his new book. Clever chap. He's also acting as "the opposition" and every power needs an opposition to keep it on its toes.

But there's a lot of hot air here too.

A lot of the stuff that people worry about is teen culture. Grown-ups have always thought that teens were doing something shocking that would undermine society etc etc. And much of the blogging/community stuff that he seems to object to is no exception. Young people do dumb things and think they are clever. And they do things that look dumb and are actually clever. It's all mixed up in there somewhere. And then they grow up, their revolution becomes mainstream and they start worrying about what the next wave are up to.

It'll all come out in the wash.

The problem comes when we try to tar everyone with the same brush. In interaction design you divide up your target audience - using personas usually. And you don't expect all your users to want the same things or do the same things. Some TV programmes appeal to more mature audiences, some are for kids.  Some books appeal more to women, some more to men.
It's much the same here. Some college students will blog avidly about trivia. But that doesn't mean we all have to. Or that we all have to read it.

But a few things I do believe:

• There is far too much to read, and I don't know what's important. As a result I read almost nothing. I need to go find something that'll digest stuff for me.
• Anyone who wants to keep up will have to spend hours every night reading, instead of watching TV. And wasn't it watching TV that was supposed to be rotting our minds, according to the previous generation...?
• Most of the people who are not talented at communication and authorship will not get a big audience because people will not enjoy their stuff. And the ones who are talented deserve a chance to prove themselves without having to slog through mindless "cat-up-tree" stories on local rags. It's a free market thing. The survival of the fittest.
• I do believe in the power of the network and the wisdom of crowds. I think that mechanisms that let us connect and share quickly, in large numbers and with some kind of non-hierarchical structure enable us to do things that we, the human race, have never been able to achieve before. That is exciting. And I think it's good for the world economy too. Read "The wisdom of crowds" to see the evidence that this stuff works.
• Alas, just like in democracy, you actually have to do your bit and vote. So that means I'm condemned to wading through trivia so that I can lend my support to the good stuff. Bother.

So. Well done, Andrew Keen, for causing a stir. Well done, everybody else, for driving humanity to new levels of achievement though Darwinian crap-filtering. Keep up the good work. I'm off to stare at a blank wall for a while.