My Curious Life

If you’re one of my kids, you’ve heard this phrase a million times: “Are you going to react or respond?”

While the question is a useful way of instructing an older child on decision-making and self-control, it’s also applicable to the world of business, as Clayton Christensen and Scott D. Anthony note in an article Forbes ran in early August.

Christensen and Anthony focus specifically on Sony’s crisis with the Playstation 3 and its lackluster sales as compared with Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s XBox 360. Pushing the technology envelope just for the sake of staying ahead seems to be more of a knee-jerk reaction to the ever escalating war in the game console space, while Nintendo’s Wii is more of a response, opting out of the war and venturing in an altogether different direction. Nintendo made a conscious decision to take this path.

The question now is what Sony will do next … react or respond? The battle now has become a duel with Microsoft, and so far Sony has taken some serious hits. It would be interesting to see if Sony can find new ways to make the PS3 the centerpiece of a home entertainment system and serve multiple needs, thereby justifying its bigger-than-average price tag. Or perhaps Sony can be creative and find ways to let PS3 owners interact directly with Xbox360 owners via some sort of online network? Or build-out online services that meet the needs of various members of a family, again trying to make the PS3 a central home device?

Here’s hoping that Sony takes some time to reflect on what it’s learned and makes a conscious decision to respond.

The Memetic House in Dromahair, Ireland is truly amazing. While I personally think it might be a bit disconcerting to live in, you have to appreciate the creativity it took to create something that really does “blend in” with the environment around it. A very inspiring design by Dominic Stevens.

I’m beating my head against the wall again, being forced to design a web application for an ethereal “customer” that I’ve never met and only heard of in terms that would make a sociologist cringe. The attitude I seem to be running into is this:

“We, product management, already know our customers and we are building our requirements based on that fact. Design to the requirements.”

This, of course, puts the designer in an awkward position and sets the whole project up for, if not failure, a mediocre success at best. It’s a lot like drawing blindfolded. Even if you have a clear vision in your head of what you want to draw, with a blindfold on, you lose visual references and relationships that help hold the whole thing together. You will typically get some well-drawn elements, which individually look wonderful, but which don’t work in conjunction with the other elements in the drawing to convey a clear, concise image. Even talented artists have difficulty rendering familiar drawings while blindfolded.

Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to demand access to customers or get direct interaction with them. So, to try and peek under the blindfold, I’ve interviewed the product manager(s) in order to gather what I can of their direct customer interactions (if they have any). What I’m finding is that, while they can tell me a lot about what the customer said, they can rarely tell me much about what the customer did and what the context of the customer’s existence is like.

Another idea has been to review competitors’ sites to see what they’re doing and to try to learn more about the industry and its customers in that way. Again, most of what you get is anecdotal evidence that, while helpful, is far from completely accurate.

The irony to me is that the company won’t spend the money up front on customer research and interviews because it’s “too time consuming and expensive”, yet they are willing to absorb the additional development, support, training and advertising costs associated with vague requirements and a mediocre product.

Anyone out there have suggestions on how to convince a very complacent and secure client that a bit of money up front on good design research will save them a bunch of money in the long run? Any ideas on how to build a better picture of a customer without direct interaction/observation?

My family and I spent part of August enjoying an amusement park in northern Idaho just a day’s drive from our home in Oregon. This amusement park, named Silverwood, is an amazing example of how being true to a design goal and attentive to customers can reward you in almost any area.

Silverwood is now the largest theme park in the Northwest, and has had continued growth for over 20 years. They do a number of things well:

• a fairly easy-to-understand layout of the park,
• reasonable day pass and 2-day pass rates (you need at least two days to take it all in),
• plenty of convenient on-site eateries and restrooms
• rides for all ages and abilities, and
• controlled growth and expansion

They have been on a slow-growth path for the past 10 years, adding rides and attractions every couple of years so that things never quite grow too familiar or boring. Compared to the expensive, jam-packed and sprawling Disney parks, I think Silverwood has a really good thing going. It would be a fantastic exercise to do a user experience intensive on theme park design …

Are there other regional theme parks like this that try to manage both pricing and size in order to carve out a niche for themselves in an industry dominated by Disney, Six Flags and Universal?

Thank you, Panda. Has it come to this? Even “innovation” showing up in fortune cookies?

What’s even scarier is that my six year old has an idea what innovation is. In his words, “doing something new and different.” Hmm …