There’s a reason that most marketers advise us to sell things to people who are already buying: getting something important into the hands of people who have never had it – and doing it in a way that makes a sustainable difference – is difficult. An incremental improvement on a single axis is unlikely to be enough: You’ll need to…
Tag: design
A good knot: Solves a problem Is easy to remember Is easy to tie Is easy to check Is strong (causes as little reduction in the strength of the rope as possible) Is secure (doesn’t come undone when you don’t want it to) Doesn’t jam (doesn’t become extremely difficult to untie after being put under strain) Is easy to undo…
It’s simple, but so rarely done well: put yourself in your customers’ shoes at every point of interaction with your organisation and ask “What do I need at this moment? What would help me, and make me feel helped?” This photo is classic Changi – just after immigration and the bustle of putting your passports away, as you look up…
Marks and Spencer have been a mainstay of British retail for more than 100 years, so it’s hard to imagine them as disruptive innovators – but it turns out they were innovative all over. More immigration and innovation Michael Marks (born in 1859 Slonim, then part of the Russian Empire) moved to the U.K. in 1882, and within a few…
Bonus goal for 2019: 3D-print something. Chris Anderson at the Long Now Foundation on the New Industrial Revolution (full video).
In computers, parallel processing is the processing of program instructions by dividing them among multiple processors with the objective of running a program in less time. TechTarget . Vision of the future Computer processors haven’t actually got much faster since the early 2000s. The speed of an average computer’s CPU has hovered around 3 billion cycles per second (think about that for a…
Make something people can use. Put it in their hands. See what happens. If they’re eager to pay – attention, time, money – you’re onto something. Watch them. Listen to them. Tweak it. Make more of it. See what they think. If they tell their friends – and if their friends tell their friends – then you’ve got it. What…
I know almost nothing about Information Architecture, but I’ve been thinking a lot about structuring information recently. Here’s the metaphor: Jacques Carelman‘s famous Coffee pot for Masochists. All the pieces are there, but it just. doesn’t. work. We’ve all used badly put together tools, instruction manuals, software, doors. At best they’re slower and frustrate us. At worst, they cause us to…
If you’re leading an organisation or a team, a big part of your job is to help others to do their jobs. The reference escapes me, but I’m pretty sure Peter Drucker used the phrase “to make the work meaningful and the worker effective.” Making work meaningful is about vision. It means making sure people understand why what they do is important.…
Here’s a good way to build capacity: every time you do something new, open a googledoc (or your searchable, annotate-able editor of choice) and do the following: Give it a name that you’ll be able to find in future, like – Howto Make a Transfer from OurBank Use headings and subheadings to give titles to key sections Use an ordered…