Making User and Customer Experience a Business Competency
The only question we would ask Mr. Manning in addition to what UX magazine asked is "How to crowd source the user interface design?"
Enjoy!
Showing posts with label User experience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label User experience. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
From UX Magazine: Interview with Harley Manning Vice President at Forrester Research about customer and user experience
This interview was not done by us. But we think for our series Conversations, this interview by UX magazine is very relevant and important discussion. UX Magazine interviews Harley Manning Vice President, Customer Experience at Forrester Research at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum
Making User and Customer Experience a Business Competency
The only question we would ask Mr. Manning in addition to what UX magazine asked is "How to crowd source the user interface design?"
Enjoy!
Making User and Customer Experience a Business Competency
The only question we would ask Mr. Manning in addition to what UX magazine asked is "How to crowd source the user interface design?"
Enjoy!
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Conversations with Maria Palazzi - a commercial animator, decoder of choreographic thinking, user of metaphors for communications, polymath
As, a pioneer in commercial applications of computer animation, Maria Palazzi, the director of Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) at The Ohio State University, shares her views on merging arts, humanities, design and technology to further understand creative and other thinking processes. Prior to her academic appointments, Maria was a senior animator and director for Cranston/Csuri Productions. Her work has been nominated for awards from Clio, and screened at ACM SIGGRAPH and international film festivals. She is an unrelenting champion for increasing participation of young women in computer animation.
This interview with Maria is the fifth in our series about learning, design, games, social media, crowd-sourcing and work processes.
RD> The first question for you is, are you a gamer?
MP> No I am not. Never was into Board games either.
RD> How do you learn?
MP> I learn in a multimodal way. I definitely learn by doing. I also learn by reflection and I have to internalize, process and reprocess it. I read and probably that’s the best way for me to take in information. I draw and I map to make sense of complexity of ideas (perhaps my Graphics background) – that in turn allows me to process the information that I read and heard. Then lately I finish the learning process by reflecting and by communicating and reinforcing my understanding using metaphors. This last part has become more important to me, as I intensively work with multidisciplinary creative teams.
RD> True – the act of rhetoric is to create an image that someone can relate to and makes the content more relevant to the audience. Recently I read a blog written by Jill Konrath – a leading Sales effectiveness trainer interviewing Anne Miller (an author of the book Metaphorically Selling) – who talked about metaphors in sales communications. Tell me more.
MP> Absolutely, it can be used in any form of communication and understanding of complex transactions and processes. The more images you and I bring to the discussion and use the metaphors to communicate, the better the learning reinforcement is for both you and me.
RD> Do you think younger generation especially under-40 are learning differently?
MP> Well! I read. I don’t think younger generation takes their information by long-form reading that much as I do. Their information intake comes from different sources in shorter spans. I am not judging it, but the only issue I see while teaching students is how they find information. Because my Mom was a librarian and I worked in a library, I was taught very early on how to use a library, my reflexes automatically knew what keywords would lead to faster and more relevant results to find content. When Google and other search routines came along, that transition just made the results be delivered faster to me (from printed cards to my screen). Nowadays, that library visits seldom occur and how to do a keyword search is not a skill that is intuitive to them, , Sometimes working with my students, with all their different devices, they have a tough time finding scholarly information. I find that they struggle to determine what keyword they should put in that makes their search provide efficient and relevant search results. This I think makes their start of their learning longer. Once the information is received, processing the information and complexity of ideas—irrespective of age, I think there is no difference. Then it diverges again during reflection and communication, but that’s more of a style preference. These days, irrespective of age, use metaphors and more non-linear way of communicating simply because interactive learning and media tools make it faster to communicate complex ideas. Of course you must realize I have an inherent bias in my observations because I deal with Arts and Design people.
RD> What is your definition of immersive learning?
MP> It really depends on whether it is a verb or a noun. Sometimes it is how a student or a learner immerses in the content in order to learn and sometimes we create (like in ACCAD) an immersive learning environment where the learners come in to experience. I personally think that creating immersive environments or simulation-lab environments cannot only teaches someone the complex ideas but provide new understanding of old ideas. This is about immersing students in knowledge – then learning happens.
RD> If I understand what you are saying, in the technology world, that “immersing students in knowledge” is what we call “user experience”.
MP> Exactly, after the experience, the learning happens. So! As a teacher, “immersion” becomes a verb. Teaching them how to immerse and then create artifacts where they learn while immersed and then send them to the next level to learn more. Technology enables the building of artifacts. This encourages someone to become lifelong learners.
RD> This reminds me of the movie “Inception”, where you assimilate by building the artifacts and then play out the concepts and then redo for better. Have you seen it?
MP> No! I have not.
RD> You will love it – and try to see it on the big screen.
RD> How do you envision using games/simulations to teach people to use information better and also learn to understand complexity?
MP> A good example of this, is a project called Synchronous Objects that we did at ACCAD. It is about “Choreographic Thinking” based on a dance by choreographer William Forsythe. The dance is called, “One Flat Thing reproduced”. Norah Zuniga Shaw, a professor from the Dance department and I worked on this project to understand how his (William Forsythe’s) choreographic thinking works. It was not meant to be a form of dance documentation, but instead a visual way to unlock the ideas about how Forsythe’s complex systems of organization. The materials we created—animations, graphics, interactive tools—are investigatory as we wanted to probe Bill’s choreographic thinking and they are exploratory as we wanted to discover what we could see in the dance, and how we could visualize those interpretations.
To make Synchronous Objects, we assembled an extraordinary group of graduate students who are animators, designers, dancers, and scientists – as well as an outstanding group of faculty and researchers at Ohio State who brought their expertise the project.
RD> What is your definition of “Choreographic thinking”?
MP> A choreographer’s (in this case William Forsythe) strategies for planning time-based and space-based events and group relationships, and then presenting it in a way, a choreographer presents it to their audience.
RD> This just blows my mind. This is so similar when we think of designing complex simulations of a work process or interactions where eventually there is an output to the audience i.e. the consumer or customer in my world. Tell me more.
MP> When I first looked at it, as a graphics and visual person I could not even understand the complexity and kept asking myself, what am I looking at? I am an animator, I am a visual thinking person, and I never could seem to understand what I am looking at in the dance. I realized soon that what we typically expect a linear experience with a story-line with a beginning and an end like the NutCracker. It was not linear.
He was using this concept called “Counterpoint”, when he was arranging the piece on stage. I have been exposed to the concept of “Counterpoint” from jazz music. My parents had exposed me to lot of Jazz in my childhood. So! What finally helped me, is taking that Jazz metaphor to understand and learn about this non-linear complex narrative or as you would say “immersive simulation”.
We had to then deconstruct that thinking. We had to break it down to little parts of information bits and objects. We had to re-map using many different folks from various disciplines to build relationships among those objects. Then use information visualization skills to reconstruct sets of narrative, while keeping his ideas intact. We had to also determine how different learners would come to the site. By different learners I mean learning styles that different users would be comfortable to assimilate their own metaphors. For example, some are visual learners , some learn by word analogies etc. So! The site presents multiple ways into the material, it is very non-linear. We mined the data from the dance to define each object’s parametric range and what and how they can interact and what relationships can be had.
We have 20 objects – some of those are truly abstract – i.e. you would not assume by looking at the object that it came from that dance. But what the objects do is challenge you to answer the question – “what else might this dance look like?”
RD> To me this latter part of the exercise is applying “Group Theory” and “Topology” from my past life of dabbling in Mathematics. The objects can have certain properties like reflexive, associative and transitive as examples and then as a group or a topologic construct they can behave in certain way and you get more properties out of it that you can visualize. Is the mined data from the project shared with others? Incredible! Still having goose bumps.
MP> [Laughs] To create a continual experience for the audience, we have it available for interactive play at http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/
We share the objects – of course this is not the only interpretation but it is our interpretation. We had statisticians, anthropologists, geographers, mathematics, neuroscientists, designers, authors – lots of disciplines play with the objects and come up with organizational strategies. We shared with them, how we discovered the objects but then had intense discussions of the relationship of the objects and how they relate to the objects and led them create new prototypes.
RD> This project clearly shows how technology, art, humanities and design can be brought together to create an immersive learning environment to do innovation on a very complex process such as creativity of a dance. Of course, this validates how we can use this project thinking to deconstruct complex human interaction and work processes and recreate new innovations in thinking and work processes.
RD> You know – I can go on talking about this. But I have to let you go soon. I wanted to ask my last set of questions. You have led the path here locally in Columbus to increase women participation in technology -- what trends have you seen in 1990's versus 2000's? How do we increase women participation to join the game/graphics production? Are there gender-based differences in design thinking?
MP> We have a summer program at ACCAD, where we bring young women from 8th and 9th grade schools to participate in workshops. These selected women work with women mentors and use “problem-solving skills and collaborative learning to create digital animation”. We have been doing this now for ten years. There are no gender-based differences in output but how they approach a design is very different from what it was ten years ago. These young women understand what media is and understand what story is. They have already played with Photoshop in sixth grade. So! These young women are much more well-versed on the tools and technology and spend more time in the critical thinking or design side and come up with projects that involve complex thinking and production through a collaborative effort. Lately I have invited the same group back a few times to work on more complex projects and they have amazing retention, and I can see the changes. It then makes computer animation careers much more of a reality for them. The other interesting thing I have noticed is that these children finally see that there is a continuum of careers between an engineer and an artist. They no longer feel that they need to pick one. They want to operate in their comfort zone.
RD> Thank you Maria. It has been really interesting to chat with you. Let us continue our discussions.
MP> Let‘s do so -- because I think we have some opportunities to collaborate.
This interview with Maria is the fifth in our series about learning, design, games, social media, crowd-sourcing and work processes.
RD> The first question for you is, are you a gamer?
MP> No I am not. Never was into Board games either.
RD> How do you learn?
MP> I learn in a multimodal way. I definitely learn by doing. I also learn by reflection and I have to internalize, process and reprocess it. I read and probably that’s the best way for me to take in information. I draw and I map to make sense of complexity of ideas (perhaps my Graphics background) – that in turn allows me to process the information that I read and heard. Then lately I finish the learning process by reflecting and by communicating and reinforcing my understanding using metaphors. This last part has become more important to me, as I intensively work with multidisciplinary creative teams.
RD> True – the act of rhetoric is to create an image that someone can relate to and makes the content more relevant to the audience. Recently I read a blog written by Jill Konrath – a leading Sales effectiveness trainer interviewing Anne Miller (an author of the book Metaphorically Selling) – who talked about metaphors in sales communications. Tell me more.
MP> Absolutely, it can be used in any form of communication and understanding of complex transactions and processes. The more images you and I bring to the discussion and use the metaphors to communicate, the better the learning reinforcement is for both you and me.
RD> Do you think younger generation especially under-40 are learning differently?
MP> Well! I read. I don’t think younger generation takes their information by long-form reading that much as I do. Their information intake comes from different sources in shorter spans. I am not judging it, but the only issue I see while teaching students is how they find information. Because my Mom was a librarian and I worked in a library, I was taught very early on how to use a library, my reflexes automatically knew what keywords would lead to faster and more relevant results to find content. When Google and other search routines came along, that transition just made the results be delivered faster to me (from printed cards to my screen). Nowadays, that library visits seldom occur and how to do a keyword search is not a skill that is intuitive to them, , Sometimes working with my students, with all their different devices, they have a tough time finding scholarly information. I find that they struggle to determine what keyword they should put in that makes their search provide efficient and relevant search results. This I think makes their start of their learning longer. Once the information is received, processing the information and complexity of ideas—irrespective of age, I think there is no difference. Then it diverges again during reflection and communication, but that’s more of a style preference. These days, irrespective of age, use metaphors and more non-linear way of communicating simply because interactive learning and media tools make it faster to communicate complex ideas. Of course you must realize I have an inherent bias in my observations because I deal with Arts and Design people.
RD> What is your definition of immersive learning?
MP> It really depends on whether it is a verb or a noun. Sometimes it is how a student or a learner immerses in the content in order to learn and sometimes we create (like in ACCAD) an immersive learning environment where the learners come in to experience. I personally think that creating immersive environments or simulation-lab environments cannot only teaches someone the complex ideas but provide new understanding of old ideas. This is about immersing students in knowledge – then learning happens.
RD> If I understand what you are saying, in the technology world, that “immersing students in knowledge” is what we call “user experience”.
MP> Exactly, after the experience, the learning happens. So! As a teacher, “immersion” becomes a verb. Teaching them how to immerse and then create artifacts where they learn while immersed and then send them to the next level to learn more. Technology enables the building of artifacts. This encourages someone to become lifelong learners.
RD> This reminds me of the movie “Inception”, where you assimilate by building the artifacts and then play out the concepts and then redo for better. Have you seen it?
MP> No! I have not.
RD> You will love it – and try to see it on the big screen.
RD> How do you envision using games/simulations to teach people to use information better and also learn to understand complexity?
MP> A good example of this, is a project called Synchronous Objects that we did at ACCAD. It is about “Choreographic Thinking” based on a dance by choreographer William Forsythe. The dance is called, “One Flat Thing reproduced”. Norah Zuniga Shaw, a professor from the Dance department and I worked on this project to understand how his (William Forsythe’s) choreographic thinking works. It was not meant to be a form of dance documentation, but instead a visual way to unlock the ideas about how Forsythe’s complex systems of organization. The materials we created—animations, graphics, interactive tools—are investigatory as we wanted to probe Bill’s choreographic thinking and they are exploratory as we wanted to discover what we could see in the dance, and how we could visualize those interpretations.
To make Synchronous Objects, we assembled an extraordinary group of graduate students who are animators, designers, dancers, and scientists – as well as an outstanding group of faculty and researchers at Ohio State who brought their expertise the project.
RD> What is your definition of “Choreographic thinking”?
MP> A choreographer’s (in this case William Forsythe) strategies for planning time-based and space-based events and group relationships, and then presenting it in a way, a choreographer presents it to their audience.
RD> This just blows my mind. This is so similar when we think of designing complex simulations of a work process or interactions where eventually there is an output to the audience i.e. the consumer or customer in my world. Tell me more.
MP> When I first looked at it, as a graphics and visual person I could not even understand the complexity and kept asking myself, what am I looking at? I am an animator, I am a visual thinking person, and I never could seem to understand what I am looking at in the dance. I realized soon that what we typically expect a linear experience with a story-line with a beginning and an end like the NutCracker. It was not linear.
He was using this concept called “Counterpoint”, when he was arranging the piece on stage. I have been exposed to the concept of “Counterpoint” from jazz music. My parents had exposed me to lot of Jazz in my childhood. So! What finally helped me, is taking that Jazz metaphor to understand and learn about this non-linear complex narrative or as you would say “immersive simulation”.
We had to then deconstruct that thinking. We had to break it down to little parts of information bits and objects. We had to re-map using many different folks from various disciplines to build relationships among those objects. Then use information visualization skills to reconstruct sets of narrative, while keeping his ideas intact. We had to also determine how different learners would come to the site. By different learners I mean learning styles that different users would be comfortable to assimilate their own metaphors. For example, some are visual learners , some learn by word analogies etc. So! The site presents multiple ways into the material, it is very non-linear. We mined the data from the dance to define each object’s parametric range and what and how they can interact and what relationships can be had.
We have 20 objects – some of those are truly abstract – i.e. you would not assume by looking at the object that it came from that dance. But what the objects do is challenge you to answer the question – “what else might this dance look like?”
RD> To me this latter part of the exercise is applying “Group Theory” and “Topology” from my past life of dabbling in Mathematics. The objects can have certain properties like reflexive, associative and transitive as examples and then as a group or a topologic construct they can behave in certain way and you get more properties out of it that you can visualize. Is the mined data from the project shared with others? Incredible! Still having goose bumps.
MP> [Laughs] To create a continual experience for the audience, we have it available for interactive play at http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/
We share the objects – of course this is not the only interpretation but it is our interpretation. We had statisticians, anthropologists, geographers, mathematics, neuroscientists, designers, authors – lots of disciplines play with the objects and come up with organizational strategies. We shared with them, how we discovered the objects but then had intense discussions of the relationship of the objects and how they relate to the objects and led them create new prototypes.
RD> This project clearly shows how technology, art, humanities and design can be brought together to create an immersive learning environment to do innovation on a very complex process such as creativity of a dance. Of course, this validates how we can use this project thinking to deconstruct complex human interaction and work processes and recreate new innovations in thinking and work processes.
RD> You know – I can go on talking about this. But I have to let you go soon. I wanted to ask my last set of questions. You have led the path here locally in Columbus to increase women participation in technology -- what trends have you seen in 1990's versus 2000's? How do we increase women participation to join the game/graphics production? Are there gender-based differences in design thinking?
MP> We have a summer program at ACCAD, where we bring young women from 8th and 9th grade schools to participate in workshops. These selected women work with women mentors and use “problem-solving skills and collaborative learning to create digital animation”. We have been doing this now for ten years. There are no gender-based differences in output but how they approach a design is very different from what it was ten years ago. These young women understand what media is and understand what story is. They have already played with Photoshop in sixth grade. So! These young women are much more well-versed on the tools and technology and spend more time in the critical thinking or design side and come up with projects that involve complex thinking and production through a collaborative effort. Lately I have invited the same group back a few times to work on more complex projects and they have amazing retention, and I can see the changes. It then makes computer animation careers much more of a reality for them. The other interesting thing I have noticed is that these children finally see that there is a continuum of careers between an engineer and an artist. They no longer feel that they need to pick one. They want to operate in their comfort zone.
RD> Thank you Maria. It has been really interesting to chat with you. Let us continue our discussions.
MP> Let‘s do so -- because I think we have some opportunities to collaborate.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Conversations with TA McCann - a sailor, a CEO, a person "just interested"
As a serial entrepreneur, sailor and someone just interested in stuff, TA McCann CEO of Gist. Gist provides a next generation contact manager and social media hub delivering value to users as a crowd-sourced solutions to search, to learn and to communicate and to make valuable connections. Prior to starting Gist, TA founded “Jump2Go - providing innovative solutions for the radio industry, HelpShare - a web Q&A company, and Soft Labour, a web design and development consultancy” as well as running the Exchange business for Microsoft.
This interview with TA is the fourth in our series about learning, games, social media, crowd-sourcing and work performance.
RD> The first question for you is, are you a gamer?
TAM> I was never a video gamer but enjoy occasional board games such as Scrabble.
RD> How do you learn?
TAM> Primarily, I am an experiential learner. Secondarily, I learn by auditory and verbal learning. The best way for me is doing a project. I generally find people who are learning something that I am interested in and then I put myself around them and then do a project with them.
RD> What is your experience in how people learn and how learning is being delivered especially in the context of corporate training as opposed to schools and universities? Do you see a trend of learning content being delivered to individuals like you where the delivery adapts to the person’s way of learning?
TAM> I am certainly not an expert in education. However, I see a movement towards project-centric and team-centric learning. When I went to school, it was much more individual based and by the book. Now it is much more team reports and collaboration. I am seeing learning is a much more collective task. I see among the progressive west-coasters a more self-directed learning beginning among kindergartners. Montessori teaching was always self-directed where a teacher might say,
RD> Do you see learning and development community in businesses moving away from classroom and compliance-based training? What was your experience at Microsoft when you were there?
TAM> Yes and No. At Microsoft, classes were free and easy to attend. I took more than my fair share of classes at Microsoft, simply because I wanted to learn and it was readily available. Personally, I do not enjoy online training because I like the human interaction. I liked the instructor-led training. Many of these courses were really well done from an instructor-led training perspective but very few were project-based. Given that this was the early part of the past decade, and a bit dated as much has changed or evolved since then, I think it is moving towards a better virtual space where again it is self-directed and team-centric learning. More and more people have taken matters in their own hands via current technology and even mobile technology. They are unwilling to wait for batch-mode training, they want to crowd-source the learning. In software training, more and more people do not use manuals, nor do they sit in classes to learn how to use the software, making demand for instructor-led training less. There are many software now and more and more will be designed in the future, where the user will drive and source learning content.
For example, someone says,
RD> You are absolutely right. We have been asked many times, why we don’t have manuals for our Learning and People management SaaS console with step-by-step instructions. I always ask the user the question,
TAM> Yep! It is the continuous cycle from the user to the designer to the developer and back to the user in a continuous learning loop. I think this evolving user-driven learning model for software can hold true with any learning associated with any work process.
RD> This segues well into my next question. User adoption for enterprise software has historically been a big issue. When the user’s initial learning cycle and effort gets simplified and initial getting up and running gets simplified for an organization, data should show that users adopt faster, But there are still big issues with SaaS models such as Salesforce.com and others that come to mind. What factors affect user-adoption in this day and age?
TAM> SaaS design in the past was not very intuitive, when you consider Salesforce.com. There are three trends in the software design today and is foreshadowing enterprise software design in the future.
First, software needs to be easy to use and be intuitive. I do not see some of the SaaS or other enterprise software from ten years ago as being that.
Second the software needs to provide instant gratification to the user. After those first two are met, then the user wants more and then you give them more. There is very tight cycle of effort then reward and then effort and then reward. I think almost all enterprise software ten years from now will have this type of design model that not only addresses first-time users but also addresses the needs of ongoing-users. What this leads to is that there has to be a way where a manager can be able to say and teach in a simulated way how much more improvement user Rini can do. This is where the manager says,
At Gist, we have a new Game “Learn That Name” that teaches how to maximize the value of using Gist.
Here, we provide no manuals or training, but I-the user scores some points playing it and learns the value with small investment of time, small amount of gratification, and then learning happens.
RD> Our software and games relate not only to immediate learning goals, but also to real-time work performance metrics. We have done pilots and studies to prove the value of how it helps change behaviors and makes the learning consistent. However, the big objection that we hear time and time again, is that the user group of our technology (or other technologies like FourSquare and Gowalla) are self-selecting early adopters and that user-adoption is all about middle adopters and this might not help. We find that the incremental change in performance for early adopters is huge, the change for middle adopters is huge, and that the change for late adopters are much less. The last group, in my opinion, should look for a new job. However, this objection comes up all the time. How would you address it?
TAM> Before I answer that question, let me tell you of another trend. People who try and fail are better learners. Let’s look at the microcosm of iPhone. Most users will download an iPhone app, try it, like it, decides to continue, dislike it then delete it. This cycle is happening with any one user multiple times a month. Of course, Apple has a great job again making it intuitive and easy to install and easy to delete. I try one application but 200th time I do it, I become very confident to increase my productivity.
Mac is very good at giving that opportunity to users whereas Windows has not, hence much faster adoption in use of Mac for those who try it and less for Windows who get into the mode of “living with it.”
People who are lifelong learners are also early adopters; they like this type of change and they do it better. For employees who are these early adopters, I am not surprised that they will have a larger increase in their productivity. The performance gap between middle adopters and early adopters, I see as widening except with right leadership and incentives and rewards for the identified early adopters are leading to the traditional middle adopters move towards early adoption.
Again, the pool of early adopters is larger because failing and learning has become such a faster cycle. Learning Games companies like yours will bring more of these users to light in front of the management teams. I agree with you, late adopters should look for another job, that it’s a lost cause.
Companies should incentivise employees to be more productive with newer technology and tell them,
RD> What does social selling mean to you?
TAM> Relationship ventured networks. Everyone should consider himself or herself to be in sales. In sales and marketing, customer support, and technical support and for software – you are directly helping with recruiting and selling. In that respect, social media is every employee’s tool to social sell whether it be to end-users or to recruit employees. There are three components for that.
First there is a listening component. This way you just don’t get information about TA McCann the buyer, but more and more components of data about what TA is about. The same goes for the buyer knowing more and more about the seller. Social selling is about the buy-cycle as opposed to the sell-cycle. This means more touch-points with long-term effect in the buy cycle.
The second aspect is the “social” component. Now someone who is trying to sell to me knows I am the CEO of Gist, I started a Montessori school and I am sailor and I have backyard chickens. The seller can connect at that level. Every aspect of the information I provide is socially relevant. It is no different before whereby I met a guy at a church and eventually that guy comes to my hardware store. The last component of social-selling is the how to manage content to build that trust. I can post today,
For example, I can post today, "reviewing VoIP systems" on twitter. The ones who do this listening badly, will immediately call me to sell me their crap. Those who do it well will send me a tweet about VoIP buying guide. That education and sending me relevant content builds the understanding and builds the trust and that trust leads to the opportunity to sell.
RD> So! Looking back in the past two years what percent of significant and meaningful professional relationships have you built and nurtured using social media?
TAM> Well! The main relationships in last 2 years came from conferences, simply because I go to a lot of conferences, and I go because that’s the way I learn. So! That shared context has given me focused opportunities to generate contacts. However, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin have all been incredible useful to me to nurture that first in-person contact and also bring back people that I knew from the past to have an almost daily interaction. Social media has helped me easily maintain and take those professional relationships to the next level. The percentage is increasing in an accelerated fashion for that maintaining part with orders of magnitude.
RD> Thank you TA. It has been really interesting to chat with you. Good luck with increasing the number of Gist users.
TAM> Let us continue to promote learning!
This interview with TA is the fourth in our series about learning, games, social media, crowd-sourcing and work performance.
RD> The first question for you is, are you a gamer?
TAM> I was never a video gamer but enjoy occasional board games such as Scrabble.
RD> How do you learn?
TAM> Primarily, I am an experiential learner. Secondarily, I learn by auditory and verbal learning. The best way for me is doing a project. I generally find people who are learning something that I am interested in and then I put myself around them and then do a project with them.
RD> What is your experience in how people learn and how learning is being delivered especially in the context of corporate training as opposed to schools and universities? Do you see a trend of learning content being delivered to individuals like you where the delivery adapts to the person’s way of learning?
TAM> I am certainly not an expert in education. However, I see a movement towards project-centric and team-centric learning. When I went to school, it was much more individual based and by the book. Now it is much more team reports and collaboration. I am seeing learning is a much more collective task. I see among the progressive west-coasters a more self-directed learning beginning among kindergartners. Montessori teaching was always self-directed where a teacher might say,
You Suzie you are interested in hockey, you John are interested in gardening, you Rini enjoy talking about cooking – let the functional skill follow those interests and I will teach you multiplication or language or composition based on that interest.Having been on the board of a Montessori school, I understand this principle. But before, once a child was past kindergarten, the teaching became by direction from school and university and it carried on to the post-secondary and corporate world. Now the principles of self-directed training are becoming more prevalent among adults. It translates really well in the corporate world especially with the rise of social media. Now, an employee says,
I need to learn how to do the work or I am interested in having this skill, I know there are others like me who have already learned how to do it, and I will practice with them.For example, if someone wants to effectively learn how to use social media, no one goes to school for that or reads a book about it. Suppose someone wants to grow roses in their backyard and learn to use the social media technology. They start by creating some social media accounts, follow others who are writing about it, discuss with others, if they like enjoy writing, then they start blogging about roses. Amidst that dialog, and using the technology, the learner uses self-topic of interest and with trial and errors with other people with same interest learn how to grow roses.
RD> Do you see learning and development community in businesses moving away from classroom and compliance-based training? What was your experience at Microsoft when you were there?
TAM> Yes and No. At Microsoft, classes were free and easy to attend. I took more than my fair share of classes at Microsoft, simply because I wanted to learn and it was readily available. Personally, I do not enjoy online training because I like the human interaction. I liked the instructor-led training. Many of these courses were really well done from an instructor-led training perspective but very few were project-based. Given that this was the early part of the past decade, and a bit dated as much has changed or evolved since then, I think it is moving towards a better virtual space where again it is self-directed and team-centric learning. More and more people have taken matters in their own hands via current technology and even mobile technology. They are unwilling to wait for batch-mode training, they want to crowd-source the learning. In software training, more and more people do not use manuals, nor do they sit in classes to learn how to use the software, making demand for instructor-led training less. There are many software now and more and more will be designed in the future, where the user will drive and source learning content.
For example, someone says,
I have a need, I have a passion and I will use the software. If I like it, then I will tell other how well it works and then provide tips on certain things.Software developers, like us at Gist, are making it easy to use and fairly intuitive interface whereby a user asks these questions:
User - How quickly was it to set up?This dialog then creates a consumption-driven learning model. The answers they get are then proven immediately by setting it up and then when they find it easy, they tell others. Then they can answer the question,
Developer - Quick and easy.
User - How much does it cost to set-up?
Developer - Zero for Gist.
User - How much deployment do I need?
Developer - None.
How can I get it on my mobile?Then they ask by searching, if the mobile app is there, they set it up. If they like a cool button, they write about it. Then others follow. This becomes crowd-sourced and on-demand. Software when well designed will still have some complexity behind some three doors that an average user cannot open, and that’s where customer service and trainers or power-users will open those doors and promote that learning about the complexity. I think that’s the trend that traditional training community has to provide.
RD> You are absolutely right. We have been asked many times, why we don’t have manuals for our Learning and People management SaaS console with step-by-step instructions. I always ask the user the question,
What task are you trying to do?They name the task. Then I ask them,
Given you had an overview, how would you do the task?They immerse themselves in the product and then within 3 seconds they figure it out. It not shortens their learning time, as our design too is very intuitive, it saves us the cost of having an entire team doing documentation and version controls. This then saves money the user by not transferring the cost in the pricing.
TAM> Yep! It is the continuous cycle from the user to the designer to the developer and back to the user in a continuous learning loop. I think this evolving user-driven learning model for software can hold true with any learning associated with any work process.
RD> This segues well into my next question. User adoption for enterprise software has historically been a big issue. When the user’s initial learning cycle and effort gets simplified and initial getting up and running gets simplified for an organization, data should show that users adopt faster, But there are still big issues with SaaS models such as Salesforce.com and others that come to mind. What factors affect user-adoption in this day and age?
TAM> SaaS design in the past was not very intuitive, when you consider Salesforce.com. There are three trends in the software design today and is foreshadowing enterprise software design in the future.
First, software needs to be easy to use and be intuitive. I do not see some of the SaaS or other enterprise software from ten years ago as being that.
Second the software needs to provide instant gratification to the user. After those first two are met, then the user wants more and then you give them more. There is very tight cycle of effort then reward and then effort and then reward. I think almost all enterprise software ten years from now will have this type of design model that not only addresses first-time users but also addresses the needs of ongoing-users. What this leads to is that there has to be a way where a manager can be able to say and teach in a simulated way how much more improvement user Rini can do. This is where the manager says,
Rini – look what a great job you have done and announce it to the world.This brings the third piece of how what you guys are doing becomes very important in users adopting. The more and more a game’s mechanics teaches not only critical thinking and how you use the technology and work process; you have built a relationship between that learning skill and the real work. Whether you work at a call center or elsewhere, employees will have “you got a gold star” incentives in real-time. Whether it is passively broadcast or instantaneously broadcast, both are immensely valuable to increase the user adoption.
At Gist, we have a new Game “Learn That Name” that teaches how to maximize the value of using Gist.
Here, we provide no manuals or training, but I-the user scores some points playing it and learns the value with small investment of time, small amount of gratification, and then learning happens.
RD> Our software and games relate not only to immediate learning goals, but also to real-time work performance metrics. We have done pilots and studies to prove the value of how it helps change behaviors and makes the learning consistent. However, the big objection that we hear time and time again, is that the user group of our technology (or other technologies like FourSquare and Gowalla) are self-selecting early adopters and that user-adoption is all about middle adopters and this might not help. We find that the incremental change in performance for early adopters is huge, the change for middle adopters is huge, and that the change for late adopters are much less. The last group, in my opinion, should look for a new job. However, this objection comes up all the time. How would you address it?
TAM> Before I answer that question, let me tell you of another trend. People who try and fail are better learners. Let’s look at the microcosm of iPhone. Most users will download an iPhone app, try it, like it, decides to continue, dislike it then delete it. This cycle is happening with any one user multiple times a month. Of course, Apple has a great job again making it intuitive and easy to install and easy to delete. I try one application but 200th time I do it, I become very confident to increase my productivity.
Mac is very good at giving that opportunity to users whereas Windows has not, hence much faster adoption in use of Mac for those who try it and less for Windows who get into the mode of “living with it.”
People who are lifelong learners are also early adopters; they like this type of change and they do it better. For employees who are these early adopters, I am not surprised that they will have a larger increase in their productivity. The performance gap between middle adopters and early adopters, I see as widening except with right leadership and incentives and rewards for the identified early adopters are leading to the traditional middle adopters move towards early adoption.
Again, the pool of early adopters is larger because failing and learning has become such a faster cycle. Learning Games companies like yours will bring more of these users to light in front of the management teams. I agree with you, late adopters should look for another job, that it’s a lost cause.
Companies should incentivise employees to be more productive with newer technology and tell them,
you guys will figure it out yourself, you tell us how it works, you help others to use the product and we increase productivity and in the long-run, we have faster deployment cycle, we don’t need corporate training and we can have change happen faster.My experience has been that with that kind of leadership mantra, fast-fail change/reward mind-set, easily deployable technology, intuitive design will move the middle adopters.
RD> What does social selling mean to you?
TAM> Relationship ventured networks. Everyone should consider himself or herself to be in sales. In sales and marketing, customer support, and technical support and for software – you are directly helping with recruiting and selling. In that respect, social media is every employee’s tool to social sell whether it be to end-users or to recruit employees. There are three components for that.
First there is a listening component. This way you just don’t get information about TA McCann the buyer, but more and more components of data about what TA is about. The same goes for the buyer knowing more and more about the seller. Social selling is about the buy-cycle as opposed to the sell-cycle. This means more touch-points with long-term effect in the buy cycle.
The second aspect is the “social” component. Now someone who is trying to sell to me knows I am the CEO of Gist, I started a Montessori school and I am sailor and I have backyard chickens. The seller can connect at that level. Every aspect of the information I provide is socially relevant. It is no different before whereby I met a guy at a church and eventually that guy comes to my hardware store. The last component of social-selling is the how to manage content to build that trust. I can post today,
I am going to go to Hawaii and am interested in scuba-diving.This is a signal from me to the world – give me content, give me information and recommendations for hotels, best place to dive, best gear place. The opportunity then becomes to those listening how to address this.
For example, I can post today, "reviewing VoIP systems" on twitter. The ones who do this listening badly, will immediately call me to sell me their crap. Those who do it well will send me a tweet about VoIP buying guide. That education and sending me relevant content builds the understanding and builds the trust and that trust leads to the opportunity to sell.
RD> So! Looking back in the past two years what percent of significant and meaningful professional relationships have you built and nurtured using social media?
TAM> Well! The main relationships in last 2 years came from conferences, simply because I go to a lot of conferences, and I go because that’s the way I learn. So! That shared context has given me focused opportunities to generate contacts. However, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin have all been incredible useful to me to nurture that first in-person contact and also bring back people that I knew from the past to have an almost daily interaction. Social media has helped me easily maintain and take those professional relationships to the next level. The percentage is increasing in an accelerated fashion for that maintaining part with orders of magnitude.
RD> Thank you TA. It has been really interesting to chat with you. Good luck with increasing the number of Gist users.
TAM> Let us continue to promote learning!
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Ron Arad: A view
As many of you: I spend my spare time pouring over chairs. Ron Arad -- a designer to salivate on. Design -- whether it is a chair, or whether it is a room, or a glass or software. User experience is what matters.
Go to NYC --- to see the exhibit.. Or else via online. Ron Arad at MoMA
Go to NYC --- to see the exhibit.. Or else via online. Ron Arad at MoMA
Saturday, October 17, 2009
What did you just say? "You can pack your data and go!"
Recently I read the following article about you -the user- packing your data and leaving. This is the best idea that I have come across in recent times.
For those of us involved with customer-driven competition, this makes perfect business sense. If you -the provider- (a) cannot figure out cheaper ways to acquire consumers and (b) cannot keep your consumers by remaining fresh in your consumers eyes, then why should your products and services be a marketplace success?
Unfortunately VCs and Financing communities do not typically want easy ways for consumers to leave your company. However, at the end of the day the product and service must stand on its own merit.
Let our incredible interface and the experience you have and the "ease-of-use" keep you -Our User- with us and not the contract terms and conditions (T&Cs.) Excellent barriers to exit can only be created when one has a great product and gives the user a great experience. It cannot be done with great terms and conditions (T&C). Exercising T&C related business practices to keep you only makes it a further aggravating experience for you.
Some examples of T&C based exits:
1. I remember few years ago how AOL would keep users: If you called them to cancel your subscription, they would harass you for hours and hours and make it impossible to delete your userid. Finally, few State Attorney Generals (includes Elliot Spitzer) had to enforce a new rule -- "If I -- the user -- wants to leave AOL -- I really get to leave." .. without my data of course.
2. Today, the first thing that comes to my mind is Linkedin. They impose a 30 day to get out of their Premium subscription. After you realize that their Premium subscription is still expensive and there are no good applications, making you decide to cancel the subscription -- Guess what? Yes! you cannot leave for 30 days. No way for you to take your data and leave - ever. Even, the payment takes 30 days. Linkedin is waiting to be defeated by the next "connections" imitator coming into play. So! be it.
Read this ... Pack Up Your Data and Leave Whenever You Want, It’s the New Rule of the Cloud
For those of us involved with customer-driven competition, this makes perfect business sense. If you -the provider- (a) cannot figure out cheaper ways to acquire consumers and (b) cannot keep your consumers by remaining fresh in your consumers eyes, then why should your products and services be a marketplace success?
Unfortunately VCs and Financing communities do not typically want easy ways for consumers to leave your company. However, at the end of the day the product and service must stand on its own merit.
Let our incredible interface and the experience you have and the "ease-of-use" keep you -Our User- with us and not the contract terms and conditions (T&Cs.) Excellent barriers to exit can only be created when one has a great product and gives the user a great experience. It cannot be done with great terms and conditions (T&C). Exercising T&C related business practices to keep you only makes it a further aggravating experience for you.
Some examples of T&C based exits:
1. I remember few years ago how AOL would keep users: If you called them to cancel your subscription, they would harass you for hours and hours and make it impossible to delete your userid. Finally, few State Attorney Generals (includes Elliot Spitzer) had to enforce a new rule -- "If I -- the user -- wants to leave AOL -- I really get to leave." .. without my data of course.
2. Today, the first thing that comes to my mind is Linkedin. They impose a 30 day to get out of their Premium subscription. After you realize that their Premium subscription is still expensive and there are no good applications, making you decide to cancel the subscription -- Guess what? Yes! you cannot leave for 30 days. No way for you to take your data and leave - ever. Even, the payment takes 30 days. Linkedin is waiting to be defeated by the next "connections" imitator coming into play. So! be it.
Read this ... Pack Up Your Data and Leave Whenever You Want, It’s the New Rule of the Cloud
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