Dumbest Business Moment: Dare you Suggest

I was reading the 101 dumbest business moments released by the Fortune magazine. Number 51 caught my eyes.

An innocent and enthusiastic nine year old, who apparently loves her iPod Nano, sends a letter to Steve Jobs putting her thoughts as how the product can be improved. In a typical case, most companies would ignore such mails. Companies claiming to have customer focus would probably have an automated server spewing ‘Thanks’ email, of course with no follow-ups.

But Apple maintaining its legacy goes one step ahead and earning its place of number 51 in Fortune 101 Dumbest Business Moments.

 

One, two, three, four, we’ll sue you if you send us more

Nine-year-old Shea O’Gorman sends a letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs suggesting ideas for improving her beloved iPod Nano, including adding onscreen lyrics so people can sing along. She gets back a letter from Apple’s legal counsel stating that the company doesn’t accept unsolicited ideas and telling her not to send in any more suggestions.

 

 

  

Clearly Apple shooed away the girl with a stick.

 

I am sure we will not start doing Boo to Apple henceforth. We all love their products. However this is something of a concern.

This is a classic example of what most of the organizations face today – ‘Getting their act together to focus on the customer. As for the legal counsel, they just did what they are supposed to do – Protect the legal interests of Apple. Interestingly, I learnt that Apple had an internal meeting to review its corporate policy. However this was not for revising its stand on any ideas coming from its customers rather how to deal with kids. 

Most of the departments in any organization are hardly briefed about customer focus and its policies. Finance Department, HR, Legal though act as support functions should have the primary mandate of customer focus. 

With hours to go for 2008, lets hope that, in the new year, companies forge new fool proof programs to make every interaction a delight. . 

Design Irony & The ‘Smart User’

In the last blog I was mentioning about ‘Design Irony’ with design gap of wordpress spell check engine as the case. I was playing around with this scenario in my mind and was analyzing the circumstances that could have brought this up. I would like share my analysis on this:

A company or team is formed with the motive of creating one of the best blog platforms. The task is daunting. Imagine creating a platform where some half a million users post their thoughts. When building such a complicated system, the team would be busy focusing on the business aspects, technology aspects, usability aspects, wow features etc.

Team has definitely worked hard; the statistics and user base speak for themselves.

However at the end of the day a user has found a gap in the screen which he/she views and uses the most. Is ‘blog’ being pointed out as a wrong word by the spell check engine a real showstopper? Of course not!

The specific observation that I would like to bring about is at the end of the day the end user caught the flaw and there is some change in perception about wordpress. It can’t be quantified. But there is a change.

What in the good work and dynamics of wordpress missed this? Why do so many ‘over the web’ and ‘physical world’ organizations end up in this situation?

The team at wordpress, like any other team in the zillions of organizations around the world, was dead focused on the getting the task done. So deep into the hole that making sure that spell check is on dot (and many other things which are yet to be caught) is the least of ‘least priorities’.

The end user however is absolutely defocused and doing what he is supposed to do. Not much effort needed from the user. His space (interpret it as the scope of regular things he does in wordpress) is pretty clean and serene, relative to what the team in wordpress had to live in.

So how can organizations make sure that they can catch such trivial things which are quite something to the end user or consumer?

They could have probably caught this if they had put themselves better into shoes of user. What is the psychology of the end user? What little nig – nags would get the attention and how can the team catch that? Is this feature really important? Where does the eye of the user go?

Such nig nags go beyond the obvious usability considerations, which the organizations do focus on.

Organizations can consider going to Smart User.

I would define ‘Smart User’ as a loyal user of organization’s services who is devilish and scouting on gaps in details. He/She is an evangelist of the service rendered and is very keen to ensure that the service quality is nothing less than excellent and as a consequence make sure that the organization rendering the service is nothing less than excellent in the marketplace.

‘Smart User’ usually doesn’t expect any rewards for his/her efforts in championing the service. However a responsible organization, which never compromises on any details should reward and encourage such users. I would ideally expect this to go beyond the regular gifts that are a part of any focus group study. The model should encourage every user to become a smart user and the onus is on the organization to develop quality metrics to ensure that there isn’t any dilution in the Smart User base.

The process doesn’t stop there. Organization needs to ensure that feedback from ‘Smart Users’, after qualifying them, should be tightly stitched with the research and development team or the core team responsible for wysiwyg. This is so critical, that without such an organizational operation model, the smart user’s efforts go waste; for a true smart user would be more interested in seeing a perceivable change or understanding the reasons for it not being changed as against being happy with the rewards he/she got. Organizational roles, responsibilities and rewards should be tied to this as well so that no employee at any given point of time fails to recognize the value of smart users.

We are well aware that several companies of the internet age use Smart Users. Google started off by select invitations to Gmail and since then have followed the approach. They expand the user base as the offering gets clean. So do many software companies with their Beta releases. The Apple Safari browser is a great example of the beta release mechanism with its integrated tool for logging bugs. However the majority of observations here are not about the Over the Web organizations but about the several thousand organizations that interact with customers in the physical world. 

Is there a way an organization can fix some of the trivial details before it’s opened to the user base? I could think of only one solution: Develop the art of focusing and Defocusing. Just like a sculptor chiseling the stone at close proximity. After every few chisels sculptor quickly taking two steps back and stares at the evolving sculpture; Just putting on the shoes of the million people who might look at it.

 

This is not something easy to develop. Each and every employee at all levels – from the levels of researcher, developer to Director, CEO must consciously develop the ability to: 

 Focus, defocus and refocus at will

 

Design Irony

This is what I would like to call as a ‘Design Irony’.

That me blogging for the first time and that too on wordpress, I was just exploring the formatting features. The spell check icon just got my attention; so just went ahead and tried. Irony I guess, the spell check engine of wordpress, one of the dominant blog platforms, alerts me that ‘blog’ is a wrong spelling! Just clicked on it to see what the other recommended words are and realized that blog is not a valid English word according to wordpress.

 

 

Blog – WordPress – Thanks for blogging – blog – start your blog – search blog – blogroll all being dominant terms in www.wordpress.com, It’s just a design irony to see that the engine considers blog as a wrong English word.

Interestingly though, the spell engine of my Apple Safari browser acknowledges blog as a word used in human language, which otherwise would be highlighted with red dot underline.

I am sure there are plenty of such design ironies.

What do you think? 

D’Focuz

With the theme for my blog decided, I singed up with wordpress.Now comes the choice of blog topic. More than getting a rhyme I was more interested in something that has a message.

D’focus. 

Ecosystems of business, technology, usability and more importantly society are driven by various dynamics. Dynamics dictated by nature, collective psychology, group behavior, voice of the majority and consequences of players’ actions.

I believe that many dynamics are logical results of decisions made by us. When the ecosystem is well designed, defined and smartly placed, factor of dissatisfaction and destruction goes down. Essentially if we design the ecosystem with all the aspects covered, world can be a better place.

It’s obvious? Yes but no.

Why?

Simply because we are busy with our own part in the ecosystem. All of us are part of multiple ecosystems and depending on the various characteristics, we play varying roles in different ecosystems. So busy with our role that we mistake ecosystems as social classification of existing beings. If we step back a little, Defocus from our roles, we can make a change.

This blog attempts to De-focus and have a Design Focus on ecosystems.

Defocus for ‘D’esign Focus.

As for the Z instead of S, Well domain was not available.

Shout Space

Here I am with my thought space. At last. 

So what now? Where does the Inspiration come from?

Scene 1

Just in one of those ‘lets talk about world’ chats that started off with our friendly baker’s decision to extend the menu with noodles, I ended up listening to my colleagues questioning the purpose of my existence. There were two reasons for that claim of theirs: One, I haven’t read DaVinci Code. Neither did I make an honest attempt to watch the movie. Second, I didn’t have a registered blog under my name. With no mind to start off with their first claim, I went ahead with the second. The point my colleagues were putting across was that the life of a man in the current Internet world isn’t complete without a blog. Well anything else? No that says it all. It’s a statement. You better have a social networking id and a blog id. Else you are from Stone Age.

Scene 2

I was reading the first edition of Innovations from MIT press. Diego and Doug were invited to contribute the lead article. They write about Innovation and Leadership in a Networked World. They explain in depth about the way organizations and ecosystems collaborate in Web 2.0 era for a faster innovation cycle. The case of Steve Johnson’s Myelin Repair Foundation is fantastic and comes as a real teaser for Universities swearing believe in ‘Hide and Seek’. MRF’s model showed a three fold increase in output per one million dollar invested. Diego had provided ‘Behind the Scene’ details of the article, as how Doug and he collaborated for the article, in his blog post. Both the article and his blog are classic examples of Collaborative Innovation through Collective Intelligence. Blog by virtue becomes one of the essential collaborative tools

Two scenes, two perspectives, two players but the later wins my inspiration.