Corvus Consulting is now part of Denim & Steel Interactive. We help startups, product managers, marketing agencies & dev teams develop web and iOS products that are humane and business-smart.
Visit Denim & Steel to Learn MoreLast week an independent developer brought a storm of attention on the process of starting to make apps for RIM’s upcoming Playbook tablet. Over the weekend a RIM representative posted an open answer to the open letter on the Inside Blackberry Developer’s Blog, trying to do the right thing. The response, unfortunately, falls short and provides a good lesson for product managers and anyone else tasked with community relations.
Here’s the second of two posts focussing on subjects that come up often when I describe what I do, and do differently, in my consulting work. The first discusses the term ‘user’ in both professional labels like User Experience Designer and in software specification in general. Now the topic shifts to describing the nature of experience design.
If you’ve been in software and website development long enough to see a few releases, this scenario is likely familiar:
It’s a few days from launch, or just around sign-off on a major design component. Someone on the project has an itch and reaches for external feedback, putting part or all of the design in front of new eyes. Then they ask, innocently enough, “What do you think of this?”
Last month I traded the Olympic experience for the warm sun and waves of the Mexican Caribbean. One of the added benefits that I find in travel is discovering how those in other locales have solved various, everyday problems, and how those innovations might speak to the way we design experiences in software. On this trip, I found three examples that are elegant and worth sharing.
A sad episode unfolded last night on the Meetup page for an upcoming Third Tuesday Vancouver event that left me distressed over the health of our aspirations for social media: openness, discussion, plurality; you know, the good stuff about the stuff we’re trying to build and use.
If email were an animal it would have to be a shark: it’s been around almost forever in internet time, its basic design all but unchanged by time and circumstance. Email’s success is impressive: it’s an almost universally understood concept; it was the nascent internet’s first killer app; it’s an underpinning of identity in (some) new and legacy web applications.
Yet when we talk about email we often focus on the the shortcomings and misuses. Given the misunderstandings, misdirections and scamming that goes on in email, it’s no surprise that email gets a bad rap that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. Just like the shark.
I’m a lucky guy when it comes to getting advice on web community relations: I have friends with experience and insight that I trust, who are also patient with my questions about the right approach or even the right words to address an issue.
Just the same, it’s good to brush up on the basics every now and then, as the state of the art changes and new ideas or ways of thinking can stir up new thoughts in an otherwise old hat. This week, the Capulet Communications team of Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo, two of those kinds of friends I was talking about, released an e-book that promises to do just that as part of my holiday reading list.
Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook will be a welcome read for both old and new-school marketers who’ve seen how even small missteps in communicating with web communities can turn into anger and heartache. Darren and Julie have helped many clients run successful and responsible social media campaigns, and have gathered the most valuable lessons from their work, and the work of others, together into a tidy volume of good advice.
As if good advice isn’t enough, I’m pleased to have a spot in the book about my own approach to making the most of negative comments found on a blog. It’s heartening to see these friends bringing their insight and experience to a wider audience, and to be make a small contribution to the book as well.
At $29, Getting to First Base is easily one of the best investments in learning to communicate better on the Internet, with its ever-changing and sometimes baffling ways. It’s also a good way to divert attention from holiday hurly-burly, without any extra calories or the carbon-footprint of treeware.
