Look through any fashion magazine and you'll quickly come to understand that fashion is the act of making a costume. This clothing isn't primarily functional (if we define function in this case as warmth, or modesty, or having a pocket to keep keys handy). No, it's a costume.
And costumes are an artifice designed to remind us of something else.
So packaging is a costume.
The experience of entering a store is a costume.
Typography is a costume.
The design of your website is a costume.
There are very few ways to make something perfectly functional. There are a billion ways to invent a costume. Most marketing, then, is costume work, not the search for the most efficient function. Your form can follow your function, sure, but without a costume, it's naked.
August 29, 2013
It sounds ridiculous when you say it that way.
But of course, it is ridiculous. It's (quite possibly) the reason you're stalling.
On the other hand, there's no doubt that, "If you don't start, you will fail."
Not starting and failing lead to precisely the same outcome, with different names.
August 28, 2013
or apart from a community?
We can choose to "give back," or we can choose to give.
Viewing the web as a platform for generosity is very different than seeing an opportunity to turn it into an ATM machine. The way we spend our time online determines not only whether or not the community we choose grows and thrives, but it decides whether or not we will be part of what is built.
"What can I contribute today," might be the very best way to become part of a community. Relentless generosity brings us closer together.
The alternative? The masses of web surfers spending their time wasting their time, taking, clicking, scamming or being scammed.
When you think of the real communities you belong to, your family, your best friends, the tribes that matter… of course the decision is easy. We don't try to earn a little extra money when we split the bill at dinner or calculate market rate interest on a loan to a dear friend. And yet, when we get online, it's easy to start rationalizing our way to short-term behavior and selfishness.
Take or give?
August 27, 2013
Our series continues with the book that led to the most questions so far: The Dip.
I veered even further off the marketing path with this book, my shortest and one of my most popular books–a book that intentionally asks more questions than it answers.
This is a book about mediocrity—about having the impatience to get rid of it and the patience to avoid the problem in the first place.
Two simple, unrelated examples: You're probably mediocre at Twitter (if we define mediocre as average, then, do the math, most people are). Some people, though, set out from the first day intent on doing it often enough, generously enough and creatively enough that they would break through and become one of the handful that gets followed merely because others are following them. At some point along the way, this effort became a big enough slog that instead of leaning in, most people on the journey backed off and settled on being part of the herd of millions.
Or consider the case of the actor, the one seeking to be picked by the casting director and "made" famous. Just about every single person who enters this field fails, because the dip is so cruel and the arithmetic of being chosen is so brutal. People who are aware of the Dip, then, don't even try. They pick a different field, an endeavor where they have more control and more influence, a field where others have shown that effort can in fact lead to success.
[I don't use Twitter mostly because I saw the effort that would be required to do it 'right' and the toll it would take on me and my work. And I'm not an actor because I have no talent and because I couldn't imagine the grind of endless auditions.]
Asking the question, the one I get asked the most, "how do I know if it's a dip or a dead end?" is the wrong question, just as asking, "how do I know if it's remarkable?" isn't the key to the Purple Cow. No, the key insight is to ask the question, not to know the answer in advance. Asking yourself, "is this something that will respond to guts, effort and investment?" helps you decide whether or not this is where you can commit. And then, if you do commit, you're not browsing, you're in it.
The resistance is real indeed, and it fears being best in the world, it fears being on top, it fears being seen as the winner. So the resistance is just fine with pushing you to wander, to quit the wrong things at the wrong time, and most of all, to seek out the sinecure of mediocrity. The resistance will cajole and wheedle you until you compromise and get stuck with what you believe you deserve, instead of what you are capable of. The resistance wants a map, when you really need a compass.
Someone is going to come out the other side, someone is going to be brave enough and focused enough to be the best available option. Might as well be you.
This might not work, sure, but who better than you to try?
[Here's a two-minute excerpt from the audio, and here's the original blog about the book.]
A copout: "Create a place or a site or a tool that helps the user do whatever the user wants to do."
I think that's just one small subset of what design is. There are only a few situations where what the designer (or her client) wants is for the user to do precisely whatever the user has in mind in the short run.
More often, designers find ourselves working to get the user to want what we want.
The goal is to create design that takes the user's long-term needs and desires into account, and helps him focus his attention and goals on accomplishing something worthwhile.
That well-designed prescription bottle, for example, is well-designed because it gets you to take your medicine even when you forget or don't feel like it. If that wasn't the goal, then a cheap Baggie would do the job.
And that well-designed web site doesn't encourage aimless clicking and eventual ennui. Instead, it pushes the user to come face to face with what's on offer and to decide (hopefully) to engage.
A good airport is designed to encourage travelers not to slow down the journey of their fellows, not to get aimless or distracted (what the traveler wants in the short run) and miss a plane.
A great book cover gets someone who isn't inclined to buy this book (if it had a plain paper wrapper) to pick it up and suddenly want what the author wants–for the reader to want to read it.
Good scissors for kids ought to be fabulous at cutting paper but not so good at cutting sisters, no matter how much little brother wants to.
Unethical design, then, is using the power of design to get the user to do something he regrets. Great design is pushing/focusing the user to do something that he'll thank you for later.
Designing for 'everyone to do anything' is difficult to do well and ultimately a cop out. It absolves the designer of responsibility, sure, but it is also design without intent or generosity.
Great designers can easily answer the question, "what do you want the user to do?"
No kid sets out to make Doritos commercials. No one grows up saying, "I want to go into marketing."
More than ever, though, folks grow up saying, "I want to change the world." More than ever, that means telling stories, changing minds and building a tribe.
You know, marketing.
At least if you want it to be.
August 25, 2013
Kodak, of course, ruled their world. They were as close to a monopoly as they could get for generations.
Along the way, though, the company made the mistake of misdefining quality. They thought that what would ensure their future was better fidelity film. And without a doubt, they delivered on the promise of ever better film stock, with all the things a professional photographer could hope for.
Polaroid, for a while a disruptive competitor of Kodak's, fell into precisely the same trap. As they gained market share, they doubled down on image quality, raising their prices to support cameras and film that would compete with Kodak's leadership in fidelity.
It turns out that what people actually wanted was the ability to take and share billions of photos at vanishingly small cost. The 'quality' that most of the customer base wanted was cheap and easy, not museum quality.
This confusion happens all the time. Quality is not an absolute measure. It doesn't mean 'deluxeness' or 'perfection'. It means keeping the promise the customer wants you to make.
August 24, 2013
We presume.
Human beings take shortcuts and believe in stereotypes. Sometimes we misjudge someone as dumb, who isn't, or unsuccessful, who is far from it. Too often, we make grave errors, disrespect our fellows and lose out on opportunities because we're too busy judging.
The way the authorities treated Aditya Mukerjee a few weeks ago will/should make you shudder. This goes far beyond one person relying on stereotypes, though. It's an indictment of how too many organizations work.
I don't think we can assume that the people we hire will somehow lose their prejudices. I do think, though, that we ought to build systems where the system itself works against those stereotypes, instead of amplifying them.
Throughout his story, we encounter individuals who should have known better, professionals who should have been trained and monitored, but most of all, we see a typical bureaucracy. People who refuse to make decisions and who are absolved of responsibility for their actions (or non-actions).
TSA, TSA, TSA, NYPD, NYPD, FBI, JetBlue, TSA, NYPD… in this parade of uncaring cops and bureaucrats, wasn't there one person who could grab Aditya a glass of water? One person who could talk to him like a fellow human, like a fellow citizen? In the many hours that he was held, why didn't even one person stand up and say, "wait!"
We presume. And often, we're just wrong.
There are only two choices available to any large organization:
1. Hire people who make no original decisions but be damn sure that if they are going to run by the book, the book better be perfect. And build in reviews to make sure that everyone is indeed playing by the book, with significant monitoring and consequences in place for when they don't.
2. Hire people who care and give them the freedom and responsibility to act. Hold people responsible for the decisions they make, and trust their judgment.
We can do better, all of us. We better hurry.
August 23, 2013
If you want to go to Shakespeare in the Park in New York, you need to really want to go.
That's because it's free. Well, mostly free. They use a time-honored tradition to be sure that the tickets are allocated to people who truly want them: they tax the interested by having them wait on line, for hours sometimes.
It seems egalitarian, but it's actually regressive, because it doesn't take into account the fact that different people value their time differently. People with time to spare are far more likely to be rewarded.
Another example: Call the company that sells your favorite tech brand and ask for customer service. You'll be on hold for one to sixty minutes. Why do they do this? They can obviously afford to answer the phone right away, can't they?
Like the mom who waits for the sixth whine before responding to her kid, these companies are making sure that only people who really and truly need/want to talk to them actually get talked to. Everyone else hangs up long before that.
You can hear the CFO, "well, if we answered on the first ring, more people would call!"
Again, at first glance, this seems like a smart way to triage with limited resources. But once again, it misses the opportunity to treat different people differently. Shouldn't the really great customer, or the person about to buy a ton of items get their call answered right away? The time tax is a bludgeon, a blunt instrument that can't discriminate.
We don't need to make people wait in line for anything if we don't want to. Why not have the most eager theater goers trade the three hours they'd spend in line in exchange for tutoring some worthwhile kid instead? Instead of wasting all that time, we could see tens of thousands of people trading the lost time for a ticket and a chance to do something useful. (Money is just one way to adjudicate the time tax problem, but there are plenty of other resources people can trade to get to the head of the line).
This logic of scarcity can be applied to countless situations. First-come, first-served is non-digital, unfair and expensive. And yet we still use it all the time, in just about everyone situation where there is scarcity.
The opportunity isn't to auction off everything to the highest bidder, but it might lie in understanding who is waiting and what they're willing to trade for the certainty and satisfaction of getting out of line. [A great example].
When in doubt, treat different customers differently.
