Reading books helps feed passion; they are my “mashes”, a new word I just learned that means, “an intense and usually passing infatuation; also, the object of infatuation.”

Books make me feel closer to culture because books are a conversation with someone who was so intensely interested in some subject they wrote a book about it. It’s a simple point but not to be overlooked.

Below are seven ways I find new books. This discovery period is important as I like to pretend books come into life at perfect moments, bringing intellectual serendipity.

Académie Goncourt

Seven ways I find new books to read:

1. Spy. I will crane my neck and contort myself to see the spine of a book that someone is reading. I just read the Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler after I saw a woman reading it on the train. I made two not-really-necessary trips by her seat on the train in order to see what book she was engrossed in.
2. Browsing – it’s everything. When I lived in Barcelona, I sprinted through many novels. I learned the art of browsing at a bookstore named Laie. It was a period of feeling insatiable; every book seemed to give me something I had wanted without knowing I needed it. This feeling spurred me to read and hunt down new books. I read dozens and dozens of new authors from Peter Hoeg to Graham Greene, from Roddy Doyle to Daphen DuMaurier, from Salm Rushdie to Banana Yoshimito. The key was to browse without a thought of what I wanted, just to keep open and be ready to pounce.
3. “Chain” when you can. I like to read books, or authors, who were mentioned in other books or magazines because it somehow provides a reassuring context. For example, after reading Foreign Policy magazine, a magazine I’ve written for, I picked up the book, Intelligence and How to Get It by Richard E. Nisbett and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Nudge I hadn’t know about even though I became a Cass Sunstien fan after reading another of his books, Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do.
4. Amazon recommends. I’ve been using Amazons best-of-breed recommendation engine more. It’s automatic “chaining” or, as I like to say, crowd-sourced serendipity. Finding books this way is not as satisfying though.
5. Friends and people. I like to ask people that I end up having a conversation with what they are reading. There is something intimate about going to find a book that a practical stranger has told you about the day before. It feels like they’ve slipped you a secret note and you’re a spy on a mission.
6. Prize winners . You’ll be surprised how few authors you know after looking over the winners of a few of the more notable literary awards. Nobel Prize in Literature, The Man Booker Prize, or Prix Goncourt. Pick an unknown author to let yourself uncover another world.
7. Book reviews, fall back. Cutting and insightful book reviews are a pleasure. On this front, you can’t go wrong by reading the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

SnagIt by TechSmith has been released as a free beta for the Mac. I played around with it for a few minutes on a photo of Akira Isogawa. I’m very happy that a  favorite PC software tool has been ported over at last.

Snagit beta for mac on a photo of Akira Isogawa

Lars Bastholm, Ogilvy’s  relatively new Chief Digital Creative Officer.

I like him because he came across as human, empathetic, non-pretentious, and eager-for-ideas, characteristics I see as a must (versus a nice-to-have) for any would-be leader in a world covered in an internet web.

Lars Bastholm speaking at Adobe

Mr Bastholm started his talk by telling how on his first day as Creative Director in the new office he was carried out on a stretcher after throwing out his back. That’s embarrassing for anyone but also utterly human. I’ve embedded below a video of him I found (an interview, 7:52 min long)  so you get a sense of him. He also said, “Flawed is the new flawless.” I usually run in the other direction when I start to hear something playing off “_____ is the new black”, but I agree with this susinct statement.  Showing flaws is one of internet’s greatest services.

What he said was not new to anyone participating or paying attention to how everything is playing out online. The tags for anyone speaking on this subject, where duly referenced: listening, conversation, consumer has the power, and so on. But as a high-up at a big firm, he had his finger on the correct pulse and was aware of the considerable hype too.

He listed his 6 principles of social media, paraphrased they are:

1. Look at marketing as the beginning of conversation
2. Closely monitor social media conversation and be ready to respond.
3. Provide tools for users/consumers to participate in conversation.
4. Be sure to leave space for interaction.
5. Conversation is over when the consumer says it is.
6. Listen and learn from the feedback loop.

How these are implemented, of course, means everything.

The question I asked him during Q&A:
“You said social media is a conversation and that the conversation is not over until the customer says is. People at companies are busy and want to end campaigns and get on with a new project. How do you prepare clients for the continuity implied by a conversation?”

Answer: He suggests to companies they set aside innovation budgets that allow them to experiment and learn

Here is the video I promised above.

I think about this all the time. What makes some feature stunning and useful?

Nick Bilton, lead writer for Bits

One answer: a feature that helps you connect with people offline.

Nick Bilton, a new writer for the Bits blog of the New York Times, points to this offline-connection factor as what in his opinion makes the mutual friend list of Facebook a killer feature.  One example he highlights is that when you meet people at a conference (or any event), you can quickly use some app on your phone that’s tied into Faceook in order to find out who you might know in common.

It’s the same reasoning of the @harvard.edu verification that started Facebook’s viral rise. If you feature can affect offline interactions, you may be moving in the right direction. Of course,  in these cases there is a network affect that is required – everyone must be plugged in order for the feature to be valuable.

Companies like Facebook and Google have significant competitive advantage because they can take advantage of network effects in a host of ways – think of Google’s MapMaker. I’ll explore that topic of network effects and feature innovation at a later date.

Companies should be eager students of one another: not slavish, but curious and smart.

Design researchers should strive to tie their work to aid strategic decisions.

Here is one easy way to tie design research to strategy by appropriating a  popular deliverable – a Competitive Review – and turning it into what I’m calling a Friction Review. As researchers in user experience, we must ask, “What does our perspective bring to strategy?” One clear answer: an unblinking eye on the needs of the user.

Design researchers have a clear, if unstated, mandate to help users; as a result, their focus isn’t analyzing the competition but instead  understanding users/customers. The orientation is humanistic rather than antagonistic.

The art of appropriation starts with what you name something, so let’s start with the word “competitive”.

A friction is a sticky point that a user has using your software: where they have been left annoyed, confused, unsatisfied, bored or just delayed. Frictions are sometimes  seen as inevitable, such as filling out a sign up form. However, no friction should be inevitable.  Companies, such as Posterous, have cleverly eliminated steps in signing up with their service.

The drive of the idea in this post then is to systematically look at how competitors are eliminating frictions for their users. The Competitive Review becomes the user-experience person’s Friction Review.

A Friction Review looks over a broad landscape to uncover what businesses have solved the problem particularly well. You are looking to learn from other companies

Companies, and not just direct competitors, are competing with you on experience.  Google has raised the expectation of how search should perform and companies have had to (thankfully) respond by implementing better searches on their own websites or eliminating it all together.

That’s the basic gist of it. Here are a summary of steps to get get you started:

Step 1. Toss aside the obsession with competition and replace it with an obsession with customer pain points. Catalog these. Be thorough in doing this. Gathering the information through a brainstorming session, talking to coworkers across your company, and tapping your customer feedback channels (sales, surveys, in-product surveys, feedback links, studies, friends, and so on.)
Step 2. Select a particular friction (or grouping of frictions) to write a Friction Review about.
Step 3. Survey the landscape of companies;  ask people what companies they think of for a particular interaction? For example, you ask, “When you buy online, what company do you think does it the best?”
Step 4. Identify the specific points your company can learn from and make recommendations on how the website should be updated in context of your business.

These Friction Reviews should be:

1. Iterated often
2. Not terribly time-consuming to produce
3. Targeted to those in the company who can implement and approve them
4. Provide actionable recommendations.

Companies should be eager students of one another: not slavish, but curious and aware.

Three steps to putting context to the work you do.

This post started on Tuesday with a day off work. I went to South Hall on Berkeley campus to listen to a guess lecture by Björn Hartmann for a class on Tangible UI.

South Hall, Berkeley campus

Björn listed three “dimensions” he keeps in the background of his mind for his research and projects on building tangible user interfaces. Here they are:

1. Re-purpose familiar objects vs. Employ familiar metaphors
2. Add tangible control to existing systems vs. Design new artifacts from scratch
3. Single user vs. Audience participation, where you’re trying to engage many people at once

Or, written as questions, he’s answering:

1. How do I help people understand (know how to use) a user interface?
2. What do I use to create something?
3. Who am I you building for?

This quick dissection leads nicely to a few steps on how to uncover the dimensions of your work.

1. Ask yourself three, or so, meaningful questions that you answer through your work. “How do you solve design problems regarding space?”
2. Write down possible answers to each question for various projects you’ve been part of.
3. Now, look for naturally opposed asnwers.  “I solve design problems in the natural environment vs. I solve design problems inside architectual spaces.” These become the dimensions of your work that should provide a framework for all of your work overtime.  And your work should naturally fall in one pole or the other, and not often be caught in the middle of the two.