Silberbauer Says:

I attended this seminar in London yesterday and it rocked. The term Web 2.0 wasn’t used at all but the whole thing was about how to link your website into the web itself and how to think outside your own site. I’ll be back with a more thorough description as soon as possible.

Must be hard work to be a pope. Imagine how much work the poor fellow must have put into his 10 Commandments For Motorists. Especially the second one must have taken some serious thinking for someone who’s work it is to bring the world back into the dark ages: The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm. No shit Padre?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not taking driving lessons from an old German guy who insists on crusing in a white cabriolet while standing up.

Like this Christopher Locke’s review of The Cult of The Amateure: How internet is killing our culture.
Quote: cult of the snotnose dumbfuck

I haven’t read, I don’t think I will.

The new French president Sarkozy shows up drunk to the press conference at the G8 summit.
Why do you hire communication professionals if they’re not stepping up to the occasion and preventing the president from going on stage drunk??…
Thank God it was just a microphone at a press conference and not the launch control to the nuclear missiles.

In the late nineties the University of Copenhagen shut down the department of Humanistic Computation. Scholars and IT didn’t mix, the vice deane apparently thought. IT was about programming, scholars were all about poetry and fluffy stuff. Stupid thinking – bad, bad move. Luckily in 1999 the IT University of Copenhagen stepped in and took over the market for well trained usability specialists and designers.

The idea that IT was all about numbers and algorithms also reflected onto the IT industry. Usability, interaction design and visual design were something fluffy that you applied to the web site like icing to a cake. Systems were programmed without knowledge of the user or of the user’s context and needs, and they more often than not suffered from so many conceptual mistakes that a simple revamp of the user interface just wouldn’t do the trick. To stick with the cake metaphor: It may look nice, but if the cake is genuinely bad, the icing won’t help much. The trouble was twofold: The programmers and the management didn’t understand what design was all about and we, the designers, were really bad explaining it to them. We appeared like grumpy geeks that always talked about the users and seldom about the business. No wonder: Designers were not considered a part of the business – just a part of the cost. We didn’t earn any money from the hours we spent consulting on design and concept. The projects didn’t really start, budget-wise, until the programming began.

This was of course bad for business for the web bureaus: All of the earnings had to come from a very short visual design phase and from a large, high risk, programming phase. That the conceptual design was almost non existing made the programming even more risky, as conceptual mistakes or interaction flaws would be discovered much too late in the process. This meant that quite often interaction errors were considered bugs and that we were taking immense losses trying to fix stupid design flaws that should never have been made. Just because we didn’t design before we built.

Nowadays demands are high for well educated scholars with communication skills, technical understanding, design skills, and a ‘soft’ approach to IT. Too many large scale IT projects have suffered badly from the lack of design to ignore the need for these kinds of experts. We know that the business wil suffer from bad design and profit from great design. The clients (the smart ones) are willing to pay for great design (both interaction design and visual design) and thus to bring down the risk of the programming phases.

Although a few (often large) companies still haven’t got it (they will get it, eventually, or they will suffer a slow death), most have realized that design and design consultancy are valuable business areas of their own. Furthermore, they have found out that strengthening the quality of the design and thereby the quality of the product itself may (surprise, surprise) eventually lead to bigger market shares and that branding is also a about usability, web design and the right feature set. Who would’ve known, huh?

Now we need to take the next step: We need to realize that analysis, concept and strategy must be discussed before design starts. That great design comes from a well defined strategy and clear goals.

Both the consultants and the clients must realize that it’s impossible to design – and build – anything if the strategy and business models are not there. …and that “just make it user friendly” is not a strategic goal in itself.

Too much money is still being put into platforms and websites without a well thought through branding and communication strategy. So to further bring down risk and to make each € spent on web count: Think strategic. Define your digital strategy and make sure that every website, subsite, microsite, e-mail marketing system etc. fit neatly into it. Spend the time and money needed to make sure that your consultants and designers understand what your strategy is about – or get them to help you define your digital strategy if you haven’t got one.

A small YouTube clip from a Tom Peters presentation. Play the clip for your boss, the next time he wants to benchmark you against the current Market Leader
Enjoy !

Just a recommendation to check out the Sultan of Slide Shows – Management Guru Tom Peter’s slides. You could argue about the design of the slides, but the message is clear and important for everyone engage in innovative and creative work. In the slide you get fx punchlines like this:

Enjoy!