All projects: Gel, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Bit Literacy
Archives / April 2011
Gel 2011 starts this Thursday
We're now in final preps for the Gel 2011 conference, our 9th annual event. Here's the attendee list.
Our hashtag for Twitter posts is #gel2011 - attendees, see you there! (Your custom Gel 2011 itinerary is available on your attendee page.)
Mini-guide to success
Mini-guide to success: 1) Be on time 2) Keep your word & abide by contracts 3) Apologize profusely if you fail on 1 or 2. So simple.
Blogging the journey to bit literacy
Aaron at Coffee for the Brain, an intrepid soul, has been blogging his journey toward bit literacy. Posts 1, 2, 3, and 4 (which includes this video) show really good progress. Keep it up, Aaron!
You can download Bit Literacy for free at the Apple iBookstore. Other availability listed at bitliteracy.com.
6 tickets left to Gel 2011 - last chance to sign up
If you're thinking of coming to Gel 2011 this year, right now would be a great time to sign up. Gel is in two weeks, and there are only 6 tickets left.
Gel 2011 attendees' companies include Dow Jones, Google, Estee Lauder, Microsoft, TripAdvisor, MetaFilter, HP, Entertainment Weekly, Fidelity, Scholastic, Everyday Health, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Intuit, Kickstarter, MTV, UncommonGoods, Razorfish, the New York Times, Snapfish, Swisscom AG, and Yahoo. (And a hundred or two more.)
Presenters include the founder of Kickstarter, the founder of One Medical, the creator of Everything Is A Remix, the founder of the Ig Nobel Awards, an internationally known DJ, a psychiatrist to the homeless, a VC from Singapore, three New Yorker cartoonists, and some upstart named Anil Dash. (I'm a fan.) And a bunch of others you might not have heard of but should. And will.
All this just scratches the surface of the Gel experience. As one attendee wrote last year...
Where else can one go within a day or two and be exposed to so many leading-edge thinkers and innovators, and begin to see linkages that may not have been evident before? The experience is like a journey of thousands of miles to dozens of unusual, intriguing places but without baggage or jet lag. Every year I come to Gel, I leave renewed in spirit and full of ideas.
Trust me, you don't want to miss this one. Come to Gel 2011.
Ignore the customer experience, lose a billion dollars (Walmart case study)
You're with Walmart. It's 2009, and you want to do something new, something transformative, to out-innovate rival Target. You have a sense that Target is cleaner, better designed, less cluttered. Walmart aisles are crammed, packed, an infinite jumble of product.
So you're thinking of launching an uncluttering project. Strategic. Huge. Millions of dollars. But before you make any changes, you want to float the idea by customers.
So you conduct a survey, asking customers: would you like Walmart aisles to be less cluttered? And they say, "Yes, now that you ask, yes, that would be nice." And you check the box by "customer input" and report back, hey everyone, good news, yes, customers like the idea.
Walmart spends hundreds of millions of dollars uncluttering their stores, removing 15% of inventory, shortening shelves, clearing aisles. Yes, it's expensive and time-consuming, but this is what customers said they wanted, so you barrel through it.
You'll never guess what happens now. (Actually, you've probably already guessed, but it sounded better to say you'll never guess.)
Sales went down. Way down. I mean waaaaaay down. I'm talking, from the beginning of that project until today, Walmart has lost over a billion dollars in sales. (Yes, billion with a "b".) It's actually closer to two billion dollars of sales they missed out on, and maybe more.
Needless to say, the executives in charge of the project have been fired, and Walmart is spending yet more money to return to its original, time-tested strategy of offering a huge (albeit cluttered) inventory at low prices.
But wait. Before the lost sales, the fired executives, the mad scramble, before all that: what was the billion-dollar mistake that caused this mess in the first place? You'll never guess.
The mistake was a lack of customer focus. I know, I know: "They ran a survey! Customers loved the idea!" But that's exactly the problem. Walmart didn't pursue the question of what customers wanted. Instead, Walmart came up with the answer first, then asked customers to agree to it. That's exactly the wrong thing to do, because it ignores customers while attempting to fool stakeholders into thinking that the strategy is customer-centered.
Put another way, Walmart based this incredibly expensive misadventure on what customers said, rather than what they did. And the customer experience is all about what customers do. In real life. No hypotheticals. Walmart acted without considering the customer experience, and that was a big mistake. (Maybe the biggest mistake a business can make, if you ask me.)
The lesson: ignoring the customer experience is an expensive mistake. Be sure to listen to customers the right way, so that you get a strategy that actually works. (And let me know if Creative Good can help. Maybe we can save you a billion dollars. That's always fun.)
P.S. For more on this story, read Phil Terry's Daily Artifacts post, which includes lots of numbers and links to press coverage. Thanks to Phil for pointing out the story.
Why the first digital camera stored 30 photos
The first digital camera stored exactly 30 photos, because 30 was understandable to users. Watch the interview with the inventor:
From David Friedman's blog. (via @jngo)
How to explain the American budget crisis in 5 sentences
In just five sentences, Philip Greenspun explains the American budget crisis more clearly and succinctly than I've seen it done anywhere else:
We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family's income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.
Philip points out that the entire matter is easily understood if you just take eight zeroes off of all the (otherwise unimaginably large) numbers. Read his whole post here.
Note that I'm not suggesting the solution to the crisis is simple. Just that before any solution can be found, people need to understand - and be willing to face up to - the problem at hand. A simple explanation is a great place to start.
P.S. On the subject of facing up to the problem, see this NYT profile of Pete Peterson (who has campaigned against rising debt for 30 years), or the Wikipedia entry on the National Debt Clock.
School reform with YouTube videos: Khan Academy
In this WSJ piece, Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, describes his pilot program in Los Altos, CA schools:
In order to help teachers customize their instruction, [Khan Academy] created a dashboard of robust data for them to follow, linked to their students' online exercises. Students don't move on to more advanced concepts until they have mastered basic ones. Those who get "stuck" promptly receive help, often from peers who are already proficient in a subject. The overall effect has been to create a more collaborative classroom culture.
Khan Academy is one of the most important projects in the world, really worth getting to know if you haven't already. Sal gave a tremendous talk at Gel 2010 last year describing it:
(The next Gel is Gel 2011, coming up on April 28-30.)
Gel 2011 news - itineraries posted, 2012 signup
Gel starts in less than three weeks! Here's what's going on:
• Attendees, your personal Gel itinerary is now online - log in here to see it. Day 1 and Gel Saturday experiences are all assigned, for everyone who submitted choices. (If you didn't submit choices, everything is first-come, first-serve from remaining available choices.)
• Gel Saturday is very popular, I'm happy to find, even in this first experimental year. The Eyebeam infoviz workshop was very heavily oversubscribed - by the time our assignments, made by ticket-purchase date, reached lunchtime of Gel last year, it was all full. (One more reason to sign up early for next year.)
• Gel 2012 registration is now live - sign up here for the lowest price of the year. This will be our ten-year anniversary and we're planning a schedule similar to this year: Thursday-Saturday, April 19-21, 2012. Sign up early to get the best placement for Day 1 experiences next year.
• At the Thursday night party (Thursday, April 28) we'll begin a new game I designed, called Restore, which will culminate at lunch the next day (and relates, in a way, to our Friday lunch sponsor, Carbonite). Attendees, don't miss the party!
• Other Gel 2011 info: Here's the speaker list, the full three-day schedule, and the transfer policy.
Media diet tip: Tai-Wiki-Widbee is a fun daily read.
