October 25, 2011

Quick-Leap Marketing

Lately, I’ve used the term “Quick-Leap Marketing” to describe language that makes your target audience instantly understand how your product can fit into their lives as quickly and easily as possible. Instant Oh, I can see using that is possibly the quickest way to convert a prospect to a happy customer.

The key to get there is language. More specifically, a common set of words—a base that can engage as many minds as possible. You might call this a “least common denominator” approach. I can sympathize if your neck hair rose accordingly. The phrase gets a bad rap; it has unfairly become associated with the ills of this world.

Let’s look at some examples. When you make a product for businesses—or better yet the enterprise—a narrowed set of language is possible, and even preferable, because the target audience has their own set of vocabulary. But it must be common to the audience nonetheless. Here’s an example from a product I was researching:

Speed and quality of communication is vital in today’s competitive environment. Whether it’s announcing financial results to investors, launching a product or keeping staff informed, how you communicate makes a difference.Your meetings need to come off without a hitch and appear seamless to your audience.

We may frown at that paragraph. We might provide a cynical jab at its culture. But that would be wrong. See, this is the language its audience actually uses. So speak it, and help them make the quick mental leap of where you can fit in their lives.

Now lets focus on something bigger: the general consumer. When selling a consumer product, the common set of language must be as basic as possible. We can’t segment based on an enterprise vertical. We can’t use jargon. We can’t seek out specificity.

Compare Apple and Android. Apple markets with family, love, and life experience. That’s their language set. Android resellers use technical language like specs, robots, and acronyms.

An example iPhone commercial:

An example Android commercial:

An example iPad commercial:

And finally, and example Android tablet commercial:

When you look at how Apple and Android market, you realize that the basic set of language used predetermines the audience scope. Choose your words, visuals, sounds, and emotions wisely so that the right users can make the quick leap.

Posted in Marketing, Products • comments
October 17, 2011

Twitter As Life’s Platform

My colleague Pehr once said something interesting about Twitter during lunch. To paraphrase:

People are looking at their mobile screens at such accelerating rates. It’s fascinating to look at Twitter’s role in it. Twitter works because it seamlessly fits into our daily brain activity, and thus our lives. It succeeds because it doesn’t produce a mental burden when scanned, but yet provides vast, diverse quantities of information. The 140 character size is perfect for always providing something new and interesting, yet is never painful.

It’s no secret the overall increased activity people have with their mobile devices. Many people are observing and critiquing this behavior. (Luke Wroblewski is one of my favorite authorities.) But specifically with Twitter, I’d like to take a moment to discuss why it’s one of the catalysts for this trend, and what it is we yearn for.

A quick note: I’m purposely leaving out Facebook from this discussion. It’s a different subset of the root concept, but more complex and worthy of its own critique.

Why do we check Twitter on our mobile devices?

Because it’s quick, informative, intuitively organized, instantly up-to-date, and rarely (if ever) painful to do so.

What do we check?

Comments from friends, information from “in the know” pundits, insight from personal celebrities (artists, musicians, authors, actors, etc; people we personally enjoy), and general news from our macro and micro worlds.

Twitter Works

The blessing of The New. We habitually check Twitter on our mobile devices because the feeling of newness draws us. The pain to digest the constant fire hose of updates from interests is zero.

There are limits, however. These interests must be sought out. I find it difficult to track down the friends, musicians, and so forth I care to follow. And then there is a period where you aren’t sure who are worth engaging. And what if it’s not really them, but a ghost writer or, worse, a bot? Twitter is mostly human (that is, obvious to identify stripper spam from your college roommate), but that’s a problem because then the information is basically social in nature. The information is rarely personal.

Whenever you do ease into the right amount of interests populating your stream with bits of information, there is no guarantee that the signal-to-noise ratio will fit your preference.

The fact that Twitter sees itself as a social platform is the biggest limitation. Eventually, the novelty of social information will slowly dwindle, settling on a different ratio for the average user. (I think impact from demographics can be tracked as well. For example, age: teenagers have a different threshold of info going in and out of their consciousness while retirees just want to see and share pictures of their grandkids.)

Expanding The Twitter Platform

For Twitter to be truly useful, it needs to expand beyond the human-to-human social engagement. I propose a new concept for Twitter’s platform.

Twitter should be a short message platform.

Let’s break down each word:

  • Short
    As discussed earlier, the reason Twitter works is because 140 characters is perfect to deliver vast amounts of messages with zero mental burden to digest.
  • Message
    A message is the most generic, abstract way to explain how information travels. Information only exists if it is communicated. “Messages” are the package that delivers information in tidy boxes. Messages are en entity—the action-based object that makes communication possible.
  • Platform
    The marketplace that brings together users and providers. Twitter’s platform gathers and distributes tweets in many forms.

The troublesome word for Twitter is currently “message”. They’ve limited themselves to the social subset of its users’ lives. They need to expand the abstraction and target all modes and types of information people receive on a daily basis.

The real key is to expand contributors from simply people to inanimate objects and entities as well. For example, what if in my Twitter stream I had tweets with the following types of messages:

  • My car telling me it’s time for an oil change with a link to Google Maps, displaying all the shops in the area, prices, and which ones are running specials. (Realize that “Maint. Req.” on a car dashboard is nothing more than a message less than 140 characters telling you something of importance.)
  • My credit card telling me my balance is due, how much, and when the deadline is.
  • My doctor’s office telling me it’s been two years since my last physical.
  • Or better yet, my body telling me that this week is when 26-year-old males have their teeth/eyes/prostate/whatever checked out.
  • The weather telling me it’s going to be rainy and cold tomorrow.
  • My package telling me it will be arriving today at the office.
  • My subpump telling me it just broke and I better get home ASAP.
  • My fridge saying it blew a motor, and I should pick one up on the way home to fix. It shares links with me to the part’s information, documentation on how to fix it, and stores in the area where I can pick it up.
  • The dryer telling me the clothes are done. Good thing too because I forgot about them when I was trying to fix the fridge.
  • And so on and so forth. The possibilities are literally endless.

Now, Twitter becomes the information platform of my life because it is the supreme message platform of my life. So easy to quickly check and scan, but now I have personal—not social—reasons.

Think of how this beats the pants off every other business model they could approach. Twitter can serve you an ad to the fridge motor because you just found out you need it. It’s the absolute best, quickest, most relevant, most targeted way to serve advertisements.

Other points of interest that allude to success:

  • Roughly 90% or more of Twitter users are lurkers. We, as a population, check way more than we socially share. Why does Twitter cater to the sharers? Filling the lurkers’ timelines with tweets that are meaningful to them is ok, and a much better business model.
  • Every inanimate object communicates with you in some way.
  • And most only need 140 characters.

My wife, a perfect target for this concept, had some feedback.

Isn’t the purpose of Twitter, and thus social networks in general, to allow people to escape from the things they need to do in real life? I need to change the cat’s litter box, but I don’t want to. I’d rather quickly check Twitter or Facebook instead. A normal person would be so annoyed having these toys tell me I’m not doing something I should be doing.

Touché. But this is why Twitter has a ceiling.

The Future

I see the future as such:

  1. Everything will be creating data in the future. Out clothes. Our cars. Our social circles. Everything.
  2. Data is the foundation of information.
  3. Information is only useful if communicated.
  4. Humans require messages in order to process communication.

Twitter’s dynamics make it perfectly situated to be the short message platform of this future.

Posted in Communication, Products • comments
October 6, 2011

Death is Life’s Greatest Invention

That’s a quote from Steve Jobs. He liked how it allowed the old to be removed and new to flourish.

It took his death yesterday for me to realize exactly how much he’s changed my life. He is certainly the biggest form of impersonal inspiration in my life and career. This picture has always been one of the most motivating snapshots for me:

(Image credit)

My favorite thought from Steve:

You don’t find success, it finds you. Your job is the practice so it finds you more often.

Posted in Apple, Inspiration • comments
September 28, 2011

Managing By Week

I’ve found that a week is the right time frame to manage myself and others.

Every Sunday night I sit down and go over the week ahead. I got this idea from The Economist‘s website. The premise is straight forward.

  • Look at the previous week and comment on all previous items. Were they finished? How’d they go? Was there anything not accomplished?
  • Write out all the required tasks for the week. Things like follow ups, tasks asked of you by colleagues, etc.
  • Look at all the projects you are involved in, and write out the ones you plan to address during the week.
  • Break those projects down into subset tasks and comments. Explore what’s needed; write to help you fully understand the scope.

Evernote works really well as an organization tool. I have a notebook which houses every week’s composition. Each week is a new note.

So why by the week? A month is too long. I find that things change so much week-to-week that to tactically plan a month in advance is futile. (Note: This does not mean strategic planning can’t be scoped to a month or longer.) And a day is way too short. I found myself asking far too often “Is this exactly what I should be working on today?”

Instead, the week gives you the perfect encapsulation of time. It’s short enough to predict within reason how the week will go. It’s long enough to give you a full picture.

A fun analogy is the paragraph. The paragraph is the best tool to communicate a complete idea. A sentence is often too short. A full page is too long. Instead, a paragraph gives you the right amount of time and space to succinctly illustrate a thought.

Posted in Management, Personal • comments
August 21, 2011

Empathy Is Most Important

The most important tool designers can have is empathy, or the ability to understand one’s feelings to the same level as their own. On the surface, this may seem expected. It might also seem mushy. But it’s more complex and important than indication would lead on.

First, lets talk about design. To design is to motivate. It is not to inspire. Art is the better career for changing an audiences perspective. That doesn’t mean design can’t be inspiring. Plenty of designers are inspired by a fresh take on an old convention. But other designers are not necessarily the audience for our creation.

No, we motivate and persuade. We get people to click buttons, fill out forms, pull levers, write with pens. We persuade them to buy books, search for information, forward an email, push that shiny red button. Granted, not all design is meant to be so manipulative: thousands of designs go into engineering a car—one centimeter off and a part can break. But for the purposes of digital design, I believe our primary purpose is to convince our audience to do an action.

In order to properly motivate, the designer must understand her audience. This is a known, generic observation. Everyone has heard of the cliché “put yourself in the user’s shoes” and so on. Although this is important, and I agree a requirement, it’s only a light descriptor for the root objective.

I’ve found that empathy is the foundational lens a designer must use. The main reasons:

  • You genuinely feel awful when your design doesn’t work as intended for the user. This provides as much drive as anything to continually be better.
  • Your design has more compassion as you’re concerned about how it impacts the user’s day. This leads to a heightened understanding of the audience.
  • Your design feels more human.
  • Your design has more clarity.
  • Since you care about the user, you do understand how they think. This leads to a better execution of the main goal of the design: to motivate the user to do what you want them to.

Designers are the champions for empathy. Unfortunately, care like this gets a bad rap. Thus, empathy must be an organizational trait.

If engineers and developers don’t have empathy for the customer, corners will be cut and wrong approaches will be taken. After all, it’s much easier to not care about the users, even if you do have an understanding of what they want.

If marketing and sales do not have empathy for the customer, the wrong messages will be sold.

If management doesn’t have empathy for the customer, guidance will be misplaced. Focus will not be on the what really matters.

There is a difference between understanding the end user and genuinely caring about their experience with a product. If empathy isn’t present throughout the product’s provider, it shows.

Posted in Design, Products • comments
August 19, 2011

IE Bug: Positioning, Containers, and HasLayout

I’m going to walk through a curious bug IE has had for quite some time relating to relatively positioned parents. Upon retrospect, this is a solved problem. Brunildo has two good examples. I wanted to work through the problem by myself, though, to make sure I understood its implications.

In short, this bug exists when one attempts to position an absolute element inside of a relative parent. This trick has existed a very long time. Simply make the parent relatively positioned, and the child will position itself absolutely to it, rather than the body (or any other parent with position relative).

With older versions of Internet Explorer, the child doesn’t act as expected. In the image below, I have three divs structured like so:

/* css */
#container {
	position: relative;
}
#main_col {
	margin-left: 100px;
}
#sub_col {
	position: absolute;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
	width: 100px;
}
<!--html-->
<div id="container">
	<div id="sub_col">sub</div>
	<div id="main_col">main</div>
</div>

The sub div is not in the upper left of the container. Odd behavior.

This relates to hasLayout, an important understanding about IE. Learn about it here.

So let’s try adding hasLayout to the two inner divs. Our updated CSS:

/* css */
#container {
	position: relative;
}
#main_col {
	margin-left: 100px;
	height: 100px;
}
#sub_col {
	position: absolute;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
	width: 100px;
	height: 50px;
}

The result:

The result did not change. The real fix is adding hasLayout to the containing, relatively positioned parent. Our updated CSS:

/* css */
#container {
	position: relative;
	height: 150px;
}
#main_col {
	margin-left: 100px;
	height: 100px;
}
#sub_col {
	position: absolute;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
	width: 100px;
	height: 50px;
}

And the final image:

Height isn’t necessarily the route to go to fix the parent’s woes. Many other hasLayout tricks exist, so it’s up to you to work with what’s best for your project.

Posted in Code, IE Tests • comments
August 16, 2011

Writing Is Important

I’ve started to realize the therapeutic benefits of publicly writing.

  • It forces you to be clearer with your thoughts, even if no one is reading them.
  • Ideas become easy to share if you need to. For example, a technical problem you solved, and want to share on communities like Stack Exchange, etc.
  • If the content is good, it can help boost your public awareness. Not necessarily in a selfish way, but in a manner to help others understand who you are, how you communicate, are and how you think.
With that said, I will be attempting to publish more of my thoughts in a journal format.
Posted in Personal • comments