All projects: Gel, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Bit Literacy
What's missing in our shiny innovative future
There are two buckets of things you have to pay attention to:
• The new bucket of the newest, smartest, trendiest, shiniest things that the world has never heard of until this moment.
• And the old bucket of solid, dependable, tried and true essentials that have been around since the beginning of business.
I'm going to argue that any project or company requires both for a chance at success. And it's not as common as you might expect.
I recently advised an executive team from a major services firm (well-known, several million paying customers), who were looking for "the next big thing" to impact their field. I started by guessing three major trends - all from the "new bucket" - they had heard plenty about from other stakeholders and "gurus"...
• innovation
• social media
• mobile
...and sure enough, they nodded their heads in agreement. I then said, more or less,...
Here's the new bucket: Innovation, social media, and mobile are combining to create a new and emerging layer to the online user experience. Google search results are no longer the primary go-to resource for knowledge and guidance. Instead, the social layer - call it the "social graph" or the "social Web" - is being layered into news sites, online stores, media destinations, aggregators, and so on.
What your friends and contacts say, how they rate and comment, is now available and just as prominent as what Google Search might come back with. And possibly more relevant, since it's your own friends offering the data.
Then there are standalone mobile applications that take it further, making the social graph not an overlay on the online experience, but the very basis of the experience. Foursquare is a good example of this - allowing users to interact with friends, strangers, and nearby businesses, all through a geo-located mobile device. No website, and no laptop necessary.
I'm hardly the only person talking about this. Google's own Paul Adams, in fact, recently created a slideshow called The real life social network, touching on these themes - in particular, pointing out there are degrees of closeness in friends, and a temporal aspect, that aren't covered by most services' blanket status of "friends".
There are lots of people writing, researching, and innovating on all those trends in the new bucket.
But that's not the whole story.
The old bucket is still essential: As important and legitimate as the new trends are, what's old and essential is still essential. Required for success. In at least one case, an essential part of smart business has been omitted, ignored, or forgotten for the past several generations.
Here's a story. There once was an architect who chose a location, drew up blueprints, hired a contractor, and then built a grand house, top to bottom. Then he painted it. Decorated it. Furnished it. And finally, when everything was completely done, showed it to the client - for the very first time.
"Here, I built you a house. I hope you like it."
Can you imagine anyone working that way - building something from concept to finished product, actually launching it, before ever speaking to the person it's intended for?
Don't laugh. That's how most companies work. I was just at a VC-based startup learning about their product, already developed and launched at a cost of several million dollars. "Have you talked to any customers about what they think, whether they want this, or how it might fit into their lives?" I asked the team.
"No," came the answer, "the VCs are breathing down our necks and want to see results now, now, now."
So goes life in companies big and small - focusing solely on the new bucket (let's innovate in social media and mobile, now now now!) ... while continuing to ignore the old bucket (we'll get to customers later, after we've launched).
The winners in your field, I guarantee, are the teams that draw from both old and new: innovation and customers, social media and customers, mobile and customers. Keep that in mind the whenever you hear about the next shiny new trend.
Mark, regarding your "old bucket" parable: this is EXACTLY WHY our visualization practice has gone off the charts in the past year. Clients/Stakeholders/users see - and participate in - the design of their products before they're ever built. I was sort of half-expecting you to mention visualization there because it's our argument for visualization nearly word-for-word, but you didn't. So, maybe the "old bucket" is newer than you think, or at least perhaps it contains new ways of performing "old bucket" activities?
I was working with a client a few years ago (setting up our enterprise software application) and a question came up about a particular feature we didn't have.
The conversation went like this:
Client: "How could you not have feature X in an application like this?"
Me: "Well, nobody has ever asked for it before. None of our other clients do business that way, or it hasn't become enough of an issue for them to request that we add it."
Client: "I just don't see how you can sell it without having a basic feature like this."
Me: "Well, we sold it to you."
I was joking (kind of) with my reply, but what I came to realize later is that one of our biggest competitive advantages is the commitment to listen to our customers.
The development of the product is driven by them. We never set out to play catch up with all the other ERP applications in the world; we set out to build a different kind of product, one that made sense to the customer and was driven by actual needs rather than other competitors' feature lists.
It turns out that listening to customers over and over makes for a pretty good selling tool too...better than the shiny new tool if you ask me.
As someone running social media for a major luxury brand, i could not agree more! Awesome post thank you Mark.
Great post, Mark. Never forget that the customer, their behavior, and what matters to them, are what will make your digital strategy/product/service/campaign succeed or fail. (Not whether or not it's built on any particular platform or tool.)
The yin and yang are always present. I love the practical perspective illustrated in your post.
In last nights episode of the current UK series of 'The Apprentice' the teams illustrated your point perfectly Mark.
The task was to create a new household cleaner, tough gig!
Neither team did well, either by completely ignoring the old bucket or by forgetting that new bucket change, no matter how innovative needs to take the customer with it.
These are busines people who have run or been key executives in business how soon we forget the customer when trying to clean up!
Mark, a great post as usual but I hope to god some VCs, entrepreneurs, AND operational managers and accountants are reading this and taking it to heart. Why some people don't BELIEVE that common sense leads to good design is a mystery.
As a product designer I often speak with VCs and entrepreneurs about their ideas. These people ALWAYS want to pick my brain for instant solutions, as if I'm withholding some great internet design secret. There's no secret here. I feel like so much business is mis-directed and so many opportunities are lost because people simply do not WANT to listen to the lessons that good designers already know.