Archive for March, 2009

Last week somebody who should have been working tipped me off to the story of Douglas Bowman, a lead designer at Google, quitting at least in part because his design decisions were being second-guessed and subjected to minute quantitative analysis.  Quantitative analysis at Google?  Who knew? Bowman wrote in his blog,

I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

That certainly does sound a bit soul-killing for a creative person.  I hope he was able to tackle some of the more exciting problems too.  He also recounts a story of Google engineers testing over 40 different shades of blue to determine the optimal one.  Bowman sums up his departure with this: “…I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”

Time to zip up my flame suit.  I like design and designers.  Some of my best friends are designers.  I think this story is another example of a terrible and corrosive attitude that has infected many members of the design profession.  (That’s not to say it’s anywhere near restricted to that profession, but let me piss off one group at a time here.) One of the important differences between being an artist and being a designer is that designers make products or parts of products for customers, and they are answerable to the wants and requirements of those customers. An artist – and only an artist – is allowed to say that the critics are fools and follow his or her creative destiny wherever it leads.

Inspiration and creativity have a vital place.  I don’t think anybody wants to lose those things, but nobody’s inspiration is above questioning, testing and probably incremental improvement.  Google is a profit-making company and they have an obligation to their stockholders to measure any employee’s work and its contribution to the bottom line.  Google sells advertising so they have a very clear interest in making sure that their ads are the most clickable they can be.  Designers are right to want to tackle “more exciting” design problems, but shouldn’t they also have a more open-minded attitude to analytic solutions to the “miniscule” decisions?  Don’t auto manufacturers stick a designer’s work of art into a wind tunnel and subject it to materials cost analysis, safety checks and ergonomic factors?

This story reminds me of some of the less attractive practices of the marketing and consulting professions.  I’ve met plenty of marketers and consultants who tell their customers that their work is the product of genius and cannot – indeed must not – be subjected to testing or measurement.  “You can’t test brand” “you can’t measure PR” and the like.  Accountable marketers call bullshit on this attitude and so should responsible designers if you ask me.

Lest I come off as (more of) a curmudgeon here, let me suggest a possible innovation.   More and more smart marketing departments include a marketing analyst, somebody responsible for counting the beans, measuring the programs, and generally helping keep the whole function accountable to the realities of business.  What if design departments had design analysts?  The fancy pants creative directors could work on the big problems, and when somebody asks, “how many pixels wide should that be?” the designer could shrug and say, “how am I supposed to know? Ask the analyst!”

A simplistic solution, perhaps.  But until designers and marketers accept that their work is part of a complex ecosystem that also includes customers and metrics, they will continue to frustrate themselves creatively and frustrate their employers financially.

I’ve been doing webinars for a while as marketing vehicles and occasionally just for meetings.  You can see some of them on Vimeo.  As telepresence goes, a screen-sharing session with audio and sometimes video is pretty good.  I’ve used a few different tools – notably GoToWebinar, WebEx and Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro (formerly Macromedia Breeze) – and I more or less have my working method down pat.  But recently, I had  chance to observe somebody else’s webinar setup, and it was good food for thought.  So for all you webinar wannabes out there (and maybe even some pros, too), I present some of my favorite webinar tips, my own and those I’ve learned from others.

1. Have a producer

I know this won’t be practical for eveybody, but I find having somebody assist during a live webinar to be invaluable. I lean on the producer much like a radio host does, to monitor the technology and the Q&A, and to remind me if I’m talking too fast or too low or running out of time.  A live producer means you can concentrate on doing the presentation without having to pause to answer text chat questions about minor logistical things.

2. Audio on every page

Depending on your software and preferences, audio may be delivered through the internet or by having participants dial in to a conference line.  Whatever the method, it’s usually the weakest link in the system.  Be sure to include audio instructions on every slide of your presentation in case people show up late, which they always do.

3. Mise en place

Mise en place means “put in place” and in cooking, means having all your ingredients and equipment prepared ahead of time and set out in an orderly fashion so you can cook efficently and without interruption.  Here are some things that should be in your webinar Mise:

• a glass of water (no ice, nothing fizzy or hot) with a straw and a soft coaster – this is the only way you’ll stay hydrated while wearing a headset mic and not make noise that your audience will hear.  (Unless you’re Ron Moore and you want people to hear the ice clinking in your scotch)
• hardcopy of your script or presentation – you never know what might happen
• notepaper or cards for passing notes to your producer – your producer might also want to have some handy cards made up with likely phrases like “speak louder” or “you’re boring the crap out of them”
• the meeting number, URL and audio call-in number in case you get disconnected or need to provide them

4. Reboot now

The last thing you want is to have some kind of system message pop up during a session.  You can minimize the chance of this by doing a pre-emptive reboot before your webinar.  Also be sure to close or disable every application that might pop up a window, use bandwidth or make an unwelcome noise, such as outlook, instant messaging clients, scheduled tasks, skype, weather widgets, etc.

5. Mind your screen size

When creating presentations or visuals for a webinar, keep in mind that your audience may have less luxurious monitors than you do or may choose to watch your show in a window.  I like to check things in 800×600 resolution to be sure.  Be especially careful of screenshots and screen sharing where the text can become illegible if its scaled too far down.  Also, don’t expect fancy graphic gradients and effects to come through perfectly.

6. Add value with live

You’re delivering this material as a live webianr, so make sure your audience gets a live experience.  Be as interactive as possible.  Answer questions live, refer to current events, field an online poll, dont’ sound like you’re reading from a script, invite feedback, do everything you can that you would do in a live in-person presentation.  If you don’t at lest try to do that, why are you bothering with a live webinar?

7. Record, reuse, recycle

The counterpoint to #6 is that once you’ve gone through all the trouble of doing a presentation, why not get as much use out of it as possible?  Record your webinars (most webinar software has this ability, or you can use other software on top of it, such as TechSmith’s excellent Camtasia Studio) and make them available for people who missed the live show to view.  Edit them into podcasts or youtube videos.  If you have the stomach for it, watch your own webcasts to learn from your mistakes and get better at your craft.

People aren’t getting any less busy – even those who are out of work – and travel takes time and money, so I don’t expect the market for good webinars to shrink any time soon.

Almost two years ago, I engaged in – indeed was one of the planners of  – the Great Cube Shuffle, in which nearly 100 employees moved their workspaces around in an effort to support the company’s latest reorganization, spanning two floors and several different types of offices and cubicles.

This week, at a very different company, I received an email asking if I’d be willing to move my desk to allow members of a team to sit in a particular configuration.  In a company of 18 people all sitting at rows of  nearly identical desks in one big room.  Perhaps I’ve gotten old(er) and grumpy(er) but I just didn’t feel it was worth doing.

At first I just didn’t feel like moving, it’s a drag.  Then I decided I didn’t like being moved away from my current neighbors whom I like to work with more closely.  Then I came all the way around to rejecting the very premise of the moves: that it really matters that much with whom you sit in a small, agile, loosely structured company.  I came up with several flaws in the idea that seating geography is work destiny:

• you can only sit next to two people at a time, plus maybe across from a few more, means a working unit’s size is quite limited
• teamwork more often happens away from the desk, such as in conference rooms or shared work areas or even out at lunch
• we have phones, IM, skype, videoconferencing, and legs, after all, and exercise is good for you (I firmly believe walking stimulates the brain)
• most companies are multilocal, and even those that are not have at least occasional work-at-home and work-from-the-road members
• segregating teams from one another reinforces silo thinking and actually reduces collaboration. (although this paradoxically validates that you work more closely with your close neighbors)
• in small (and even large) offices, slavish localism means rearranging everybody more often as new people are added to teams
• even if you don’t directly collaborate with your immediate neighbors, having neighbors from different departments or parts of the business could spark creativity and uncover connections and solutions previously unknown (if you don’t believe this one, try sitting in the customer service or tech support area of your company for a day and tell me you didn’t learn anything)

So what’s the right answer, just randomly sit people at the first desk that you see, and never let them move?  Certainly not. If anything, I’m in favor of occasional shuffling of seating to shake up the order of things and get people thinking differently.  Hoteling is an extreme version, but I think it has some wasteful overhead and cuts down on people personalizing or customizing their workspaces.

I’d advocate one or two big shuffles per year, or as needed by growth, but when determining the new order, I’d suggest paying more attention to mixing senior and junior people and different departments than to grouping similar people.

I’ts been a while since I’ve done Word of the Day.  Today’s word is dissent.

I think dissent is pretty important.  It’s baked into the democratic system, sure, but I think it’s just as important as a business concept.  In business school we talked a lot about alignment, about getting everybody moving in the same (right) direction, and about brand, about getting everybody telling the same story in the same way.  But how do organizations determine the right direction and the right story in the first place?

I think dissent – productive dissent – is one way.  If you don’t experiment, you’ll never discover new ways of doing things, and if you don’t make space for dissent in your organization, I think you’re a lot less likely to innovate or find creative solutions to problems.  If nobody asks the inconvenient questions like “why are we doing this?” or “what would happen if we stopped doing this?” how will an organization advance?  Dissent must have a logical end, at which point an organization comes to agreement or consensus and has to bind together to get things done, but it must never go away for long.

Organizations with strong cultures and organizations that are mission-based can be more effective for having those attributes, but they also risk groupthink and hiring people who are too like-minded, even those that have “challenge assumptions” up on their mission statement.  As the definition says, dissent is voicing opinions contrary to those “previously, commonly or officially held.”

Just as dissent makes democracy stronger, I think it’s vital to organizations.  Nothing is too obvious not to be discussed, explored or tested.   A lot can be accomplished and discovered when smart people engage in respectful but otherwise unrestrained debate.  I for one, welcome it.

The Photographic Resource Center is an organization that’s very important to me, and one that serves fans and practitioners of photography around town and around the world. If you haven’t been, I urge you to visit. There’s a lot going on.  I had planned to raise money this summer for the PRC, but times are tough for all nonprofits, and I’m concerned that if we don’t raise some money now, the PRC won’t see my 29th birthday again.  So I am advancing this year’s birthday fundraiser, and I hope both of limeduck’s loyal readers can be generous.

Please visit www.firstgiving.com/11th29th or use the fundraising widget in the blog’s sidebar to learn more and make a donation.  Every dollar you donate to this page will serve as a raffle ticket for a photograph from my collection that I will give away when we raise the $2000 goal.  [UPDATE 3/30: I'm going to raffle one photo at $1,000 and another at $2,000 so the earlier donors will get two chances!]The more you give, the better your chances. The winner will have his or her choice of these three framed and matted photos.  [UPDATE 4/3: hit the $1k point, did the first drawing and Jason chose the Stupich print - two prints left, next drawing at $2k!]

Frazier King -  Brassia ondontglossam Longlen, selenium-toned GSP, Ed. 8/20, image 18.5″x14″

Mary Parisi – Boiled Chicken, 2005, ed#1/20, C-Print, signed in pen on front of print, 19½x20” (actually, this one isn’t framed right now but I can fix that easily enough)

Martin Stupich – Old Colony Rolling Lift Bridge, Fort Point Channel, Boston, 2007. K3 Inkjet print on rag paper, open edition, signed recto, 22×10.5″ [4/3 TAKEN!]

Please spread the word to others who might be interested and able to help.  And remember, the raffle won’t happen until we hit the $2000 goal!  www.firstgiving.com/11th29th