Scott Berkun's Blog, page 94

Quote of the week

"After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil – everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out of the skin awareness of your living self – your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human...

Don't be original, just be good

As another way of making the arguments I made in Good beast Innovative nearly every time, here's design legend Paul Rand.

At about the 3:00 mark he says 'don't try to be original, just try to be good'

It's also a fantastic introduction to visual design thinking: better than many textbooks I've seen.

How to convince anyone of anything

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. If you dig this idea, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.

This topic was requested with a slightly different title:  How to make a convincing argument.

Right away it's good to know most people do not like confrontation. The word argument itself tends to make people think of lawyers or divorce proceedings, unpleasant stressful things. It's worth going for a...

TurboTax Design FAIL

I'm so hopeful when I install the new version of something. Everyone is. An upgrade, the payment of cash for the new version, is an extremely hopefully act. I imagine they've fixed some things, made some nice improvements, and most of all, have taken into account the things I did with the old version.

And thinking like a designer, the best time to make me feel I chose wisely in upgrading, instead of buying a competing product, is in the first few minutes of use, known in the lingo as the OOBE...

The 22 minute meeting

No one likes meetings and for good reason. In most meetings, most of the time, most people think most of what goes on is a waste of time.

So what if you took out all of the stupid, wasteful stuff and left only the useful parts?

Enter the 22 minute meeting. This is an idea from Nicole Steinbok, and she presented the idea at Seattle Ignite 9.  When I saw her present this concept at Microsoft a few months ago, she gave one of the best short talks I've ever seen.

Here's the poster from her talk:

I c...

Problem Solving & Kobayashi Maru

Over on my post Do constraints help problem solving, Aaron asked:

I'm currently completing a dissertation titled 'Development in Product Design is driven by a response to changing constraints rather than innovation' for my 3rd year BA Product Design course. You have stated that constraints can be 'eliminated on purpose', I can understand how they can be created but not eliminated? have you got any example of this in practice?

The best attitude to have when trying to solve problems is that ...

Funniest man on TV: Craig Ferguson

I don't watch much TV, but one of my favorite things to watch is Craig Ferguson's Late Late show on CBS.

He's been on after Letterman there for years and despite how funny he is, and how good the show is, very people seem to have ever heard of the guy.

The LA Times just did a great piece about him and the show that captures much of why I like it so much:

"We have no promotion, we've got no money — it's the cheapest budget of any of the late-night shows — probably Carson Daly's too. We get...

Highest Paid Opinion Wins

Found this nice observation on work culture, that could fit in the ever growing asshole driven development list:

HiPPO – Highest Paid Person's Opinion Wins:

"HiPPO's rule the world when it comes to creating customer experiences. And that's a bad thing. No matter what you think the optimal customer experience should be on the website it is quite likely that you walk into a meeting room, or office, and regardless of your competence the HiPPO decides what goes on the site."

This is part of a...

My biggest mistakes

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on  whatever topics people submit and vote for.  If you dig this idea, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.

This week's reader's choice post: My biggest professional mistakes.

I've been thinking about this post for weeks, as I have many mistakes to pick from.

I do try very hard to learn from them, but the ones listed below have stuck with me more than others. In some cases they are mistakes I'm likely still...

Quote of the Month

Stephen Fry: If an alien was looking down on us and inspecting our language they would see the worst things we do on this planet is we torture, we kill, we abuse, we harm people, we're cruel, and those are the things of which we should be ashamed.

Among the best things we do is we breed children, we raise them, we make love to each other, we adore each other, we are affectionate and fond of each other.

How odd the language for the awful things is used casually all the time, 'oh the traffic was ...