I have seen a lot of bad management on different levels of an organization. I have been in the weeds when bad decisions were implemented, I have talked to fellow employees about it, and I have always been on the bottom rung. I have identified some important areas that affect a workforce.

1. Relationships
Building relationships are key in being able to properly manage anything. Creating a good rapport with people is important because if management is responsible for making the first step towards building a relationship, it makes it easier for employees to accept it. When it comes to working with people, a solid relationship will create a better product by eliminating time that gets wasted through interpersonal friction, finger pointing, and lack of communication.

2. Transparency, Trust and Honesty
Transparency, trust and honesty make up some of the most important pillars of a relationship. Being transparent is more than just a declaration. Transparency is an honest communication of facts. Honestly communicating what goes on builds trust and reinforces a team mentality. At the end of the day, everyone should feel that they are working on the same team. Because if a company is aligned with the same principle, that is when a team can perform at it’s best.

3. Verbiage
The words that we use can have a major impact on what we perceive, or don’t perceive. Working in the software industry a word that is often thrown around is “resources”. A project comes down the pipeline and the question is asked, “do we have resources for that?”. This statement implys more than what meets the eye. When it comes down to the reality of things, “resources” don’t build products, people do. People have skill sets that are comprised of strengths and weaknesses. So it is a huge discredit to a project to refer to the people building products as merely “resources”. Something else that I hear get thrown around is, “we need to hire the right fit”. In reality my “right fit” is different from your “right fit” is different from the companies “right fit”. So while saying, “the right fit”, sounds nice to most people; it is meaningless to everyone but yourself. So, instead of just referring to “the right fit”, refer to what your looking for specifically so more people understand exactly what you are looking for; it will make you look like you actually know what your doing.

4. Community
Throughout my professional career, I have found that it is the time spent outside of work that builds the best working relationships. In terms of teamwork, I have worked the best with the people that I have bridged the gap, at least a little bit, between colleague and friend. After a happy hour with colleagues, you bond and can interact with out the pressure of work looming overhead. You can get a better insight to who they are as people, and that information helps you not only see issues from their perspectives, which can work wonders for productivity.

5. Employee Investment
Companies who don’t invest in their employees will have a much more difficult time building a sustainable long term workforce. I am confident that a lot of people will agree that software is a quickly changing industry. New models for design and interaction, new styles of programming, new solutions; these are all important aspects to be on top of for a business. They all have different ways that they interact with your clients, and they are all important for the overall brand of a company. Investing in an opportunity for employees to go to professional events, will show your employees that you care about them, and serve your product better. The worst feeling employees can get, is the feeling that they are as dispensable as the daily paper.

6. Know your Employees
There are several generations in today’s workforce. Each generation has nuanced ways of working, and to be as competitive as possible you need to leverage strengths correctly. Generation X and the Millenial generations are going to be the major generations to study. Knowing that a Millenial is going to be very motivated by ideals and a sense of self satisfaction, is to a companies best interest. Knowing how to spot the motivations and implications of hiring “trophy kids” or “latch key kids”, can really help a company best use the strengths of the individuals. Study up on generational traits and behaviors because efficient use of people is a key in a strong product.

7. The best employees work for fun on their own
It is hard to argue that someone who is passionate about their work, won’t be a worth while hire. If an employee has a track record of doing what they love, and what they love is what your hiring the for, it is a win-win situation. You pay them for doing what they love and will do anyway, they reward you with a high quality product they poured their heart into; can’t really ask for much more than that.

8. Outsourcing is a tool that can easily be misused
Outsourcing is a tricky fence to balance on. In one hand, you have a financial breakdown. On paper you compare salary and benefits, and the choice is easy. In the other hand you don’t really have all the pieces of the puzzle that can’t be nicely put on paper. I feel that people don’t take into consideration all of the sides of the outsourcing rubix cube. In my experience, those who outsource get what they pay for. Quality is comprised, communication breaks down through the language and cultural barrier, and time is wasted because the rest of ones team is in another part of the world. It can play a key role in making employees feel dispensable, and it hurts the home countries economy to a degree. There is a reason people come to the US for school, because the education is good. Good educations help to insure quality products, third world countries make it more difficult to find people with the educations needed to make a good software product.

So, that is my rant about some things that I see that tend to hurt business.

Web intelligence is defined by Wikipedia as “The Web intelligence is the study and research of the application of Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology on the web in order to create the next generation of products, services and frameworks based on the internet.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_intelligence

I have the feeling that this is on the horizon to be the next big leap for software products. I titled this entry very specifically to relate how I foresee the field of Web Intelligence impacting the entire industry of software products.

Online software products are created by many people, each role involves making decisions that impact the product which impact user and business alike. I see on a daily basis lots of tiny decisions being made that stick the user and business with the consequence. Lets go conservatively and with only the decisions I specifically make or witness. I make 10 decisions and see 5 decisions every day about the product, they can range from use case creation to flow creation to the specific type of interaction used. We will move forward with the very conservative number saying that 15 decisions a day are made. In 2010 there are going to be 247 working days in the year, assuming a 14 day vacation is taken. That is an ultra conservative calculation of 3,705 tiny decisions a year made that impact the user and business.

The number of tiny decisions scale with the business, so imagine if you can take the assumptions and guess work out of each decision. Currently great software is made with a great reliance on instinct to guide one through the decision making process. A company who can attract world class instinct can make a world class product. For the rest of the software companies, they are reliant on the impactful decisions of the common person with out world class instincts.

Using data to inform the daily decisions will allow anyone who is creating anything, so make properly informed decisions. The advantage of the ones with the instinct, is that they will be able to make their decisions faster; the advantage to everyone else is that they will have the ability to properly make the decisions in the first place.

I can see this impacting software in an even larger way than transforming the daily assumptions into properly informed decisions. This will have an amazing impact on the functionality and ability of software interfaces to adapt to ones usage. In a lot of ways this is a step in the direction of what I consider to be the holy grail of software design which is custom software to fit the user like a nicely tailored suit.

As this area of research travels further and further down the rabbit hole, we can expect complex models of our users. We can use the models to predict usage, flows and paths, interests, connections, purchasing decisions, social trending, and beyond. I am fantastically excited to see the massive impact that Web Intelligence has on software products of the future.

I recently saw a presentation that talked about a UX Team of One that I am going to blab about.

http://www.slideshare.net/ugleah/how-to-be-a-ux-team-of-one?type=present…

I was first struck by the title, “team of one”… Sort of weird, but I will let that go. This presentation was well put together and pretty well thought out. However, I have yet to see one person, so good that they didn’t need at least a second pair of eyes on a project. I just think that for the sake of the product, there should be a team of several.

I think that this presentation sounds like it would work just fine with “resources”. I think that this process would work fine if these “resources” didn’t have skills or weakness. My issue with the term “resources” is that what actually makes things are PEOPLE. People actually have strengths and weakness’s; people get tired, people need inspiration, and people deserve more respect than to be called “resources”. So in the world of “resources” the team of one might theoretically work.

I feel that a generalist that attempts to be a Team of One, is not going to have the specialization in any one area enough to truly flush out that piece of the product. So, with a generalist Team of One, you could probably get a generally ok product. It my be functional, it may work Ok and look Ok; but is that how to make the best product? More importantly, is that is what is best for the user?

I am of the opinion that to make the best possible products, that people enjoy using and that make the company making them look good; is to have an actual team who’s skills complement each other. This team is best outlined by Coopers methodology. I like that Cooper looked to the process of Extreme Programming, and applied the concept successfully to design. What I feel is successful about the Cooper methodology, is that the team isn’t so vast and silo’d that pieces are moving independently of each other. It takes into account of personality and skills, and clearly defines their roles in a project.

Sorry, Team of One I feel that you have the wrong idea about what is best for the user.

Kudos again Cooper, we need more people striving to define process’s that create fantastic products.

www.cooper.com

So today as I was in the elevator heading up to the office, I overheard a conversation about how a product was saved by reducing the number of clicks on the site. This got me thinking about a couple of things….

The number of clicks is not the be-all and end-all to all usability problems. Useless clicks are a symptom of a bigger problem.

Over the years I have heard numerous offerings for usability improvement by reducing the amount of clicks. I was working on a large website when I heard someone from marketing explicitly state that the site needed less clicks. It brought me back to my days in college when the 1 click shopping experience came out, and there was a witch hunt for wasted clicks. So, after thinking a while about it, I feel as if I have distilled what less clicks truly means.
When it comes to clicking around less I feel as if, in most cases, this is because the overall organization of the site is failing or the visual layer of the site is not properly calling out the proper path of the user. I have found that users do not mind clicks that are meaningful and help the accomplish their goals.
So when someone offers a suggestion to lesson the number of clicks, where should the attention be directed? A good start would be at the way that the information on the site is architected. Instead of focusing on clicks, make sure that the correct information for the user goals are being shown in the correct places. Once that is squared away, make sure that the information for the user goals are being represented in the UI in meaningful places.

Re-thinking the “fold” of the page.

How important is it to put information “above the fold”? It is pretty important, and no one should discredit the importance of showing information above the fold. However, no one shoe discredit the importance of showing information below the fold either. I think that a lot of people discredit the importance of information that is below the fold, and as a means of defending the decision, people say “people don’t like scrolling”.
Eye tracking tests are showing that there are hot spots around the scroll bars of the browser, why? because scrolling is a behavior that people are used to when online. So, what does this mean? This means that if information with highest importance or functionality to the user should try to be above the fold. Page organization should flow from the most important information being at the top to the lest important at the bottom. If you can’t fit all of the information above the fold, it’s not going to ruin the site as long as you do it correctly. Give visual indication to the user that the page continues, one can’t depend only on the scroll bar. Allow for partial content to be visible so the user can easily understand that they need to scroll in order to see the rest of the content. Most importantly, knowing what your user is on each page to do greatly helps shed useless information.

Innovation is a game that some companies who choose to play must know the rules of in order to be successful. Innovation is more than a buzzword, it is controlled chaos. Innovation is the chaotic explosion that creates heat and fire, that then pushes a piston to create linear energy that then gets turned into rotary motion, that makes it’s way to move one’s business forward.

Monetizing true innovation is a tricky balance of calculated failure and funding. I don’t have an end-all be-all list of all the things any company can do to be a profitable innovator. I do however, have a short list that I feel is a good starting point. I don’t think that innovation is a cookie cutter formula that can be applied to any company. If there is, then I feel it would have to be at too high of a level to be useful to anyone.

1. Learn from mistakes
True innovation and mistakes go hand in hand. If you are doing something stable, reliable and easy; you are not a true innovator. Mistake is not a bad word, it describes a condition where you expect something to happen that doesn’t. Failure comes from not learning anything from your mistake. If you work to make an innovative product and you don’t get what you expected, there is valuable information to learn that you should hold closely and apply to your next project.

2. Hire people who can identify unusual patterns
Innovation comes from the unusual patterns that occur in life. People who have a natural tendency to make far off connections and identify non intuitive patterns, are the ones who can do a great deal for an innovative company. What you want is to take what you learned from your mistakes and be able to apply them to other industries or use them to create new products. This quality is a tricky one to interview for but will be worth it in the long run.

3. Uncover needs from wants
Innovation is rarely about answering the call of what consumers merely want. It is about creating a solution to what consumers need. Distilling the need from the want can be quite a task. If a consumer says that they want a hole in their floor so they can watch their kids play, the role of the professional is to realize that the consumer doesn’t want a hole in their floor. A hole is going to be dangerous and ugly and will devalue their house. Their need is to watch their kids, not a hole. A valuable solution would be to install a camera downstairs that they can remove when they sell the house and is installed with a couple screws along with a monitor; or even to move the kids upstairs. Discovering what will truly meet a need is what is going to get consumers to buy a product.

4. Be agile enough to spend money in the right place
Most business’s don’t tend to be able to make money off of innovative products alone. A said business typically has a strong money maker that funds the innovation. It can be easy to spend all of a companies money on creating new products and innovating, but a company can’t lose sight of the original money maker. A company needs to understand that products need to be kept up to date to stay competitive, and by ignoring the original cash cow it is not a sustainable business practice.

5. Create a culture of innovation
Through the experience that employees have in working with a company, employees can be infused with the creative though process’s that fuel innovation. I have seen companies take down cubicle walls to foster communication to give all employees cubes to foster focus. I have seen companies have all you can drink soda and all you can drink beer. Each companies needs are as different as the employees they hire. Each companies culture and innovation comes from different places and must have a custom solution. Realizing the best way to create this is for a particular company well worth the effort.

6. Set your expectations
You must face the facts innovation is: risky, expensive, difficult, time consuming, and chaotic. If that is forgotten too easily and not accepted from the get go, the end goal can be easily lost.