Corvus Consulting

Even when they aren’t part of the deliverables, I write up personas to guide most of my interaction and experience design work. They keep me tuned into motivations and needs that aren’t strictly intuitive to me.

Personas are necessarily artificial; they present a single, fictionalized instance to stand for an entire audience of customers. Despite the assumptions that such abstractions come with, they earn their keep by reminding the development team what’s important to the people they’re building for.

Lately I’ve been wondering about the single-person focus typical to personas, and whether they need to be expanded to capture the real-world social existence of users even when the design doesn’t have socialization as a primary objective.

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Like many, I watched the iPad announcement on Wednesday and then went straight to discussion forums to see what people were saying. As with any disruptive product, there’s a mix of reactions ranging from lust to uncertainty to outrage. What gets missed in the excitement for or against is the comprehensive and disciplined innovation strategy that Apple has used three times now, most recently in the iPad.
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Over the holidays, I decided to make 2009 a year to explore the more physical side of interaction design. That thought is largely inspired by the Touch platform found in the iPhone and iPod Touch, and to some extent in the trackpad gestures showing up in the latest Macbooks. It’s also driven by my belief that interaction design is going to become a much more physical enterprise with… the rise of robots! Woooo…. read on, for more than ironic futurism gags.

The most common real-world automaton is still the single-purpose robot: assembling in factories, exploring on Mars, vacuuming the living room. The robot’s current lot seems to be one of dangerous places and mundane business. In other words, what people don’t like to or can’t be around.

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Today is a big deal in the United States. In the midst of this historic election, there’s a lot of anxious uncertainty around the reliability of the voting process as it adapts to new technologies. At home in Vancouver, we find ourselves in the tail end of a streak of elections, from the federal level to the municipal (and likely the provincial before too long), so I’ve found myself reading and thinking about how elections work as a technology.

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I’m still unsure if the right moniker is Get Satisfaction or Satisfaction, but either way the service found at http://getsatisfaction.com rocks. Their entire reason for being, built right into the brand, is to create positive outcomes between companies and customers.

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This post kicks off an idea I’ve wanted to start writing about for awhile, but never found the right way to without a long post with a bunch of examples. It seems more appropriate to offer examples of the idea as I find them, and to let the tags tie the posts together. So, welcome to the debut of Outputs vs. Outcomes.

Wha? Outputs vs. Outcomes?

I often notice in applications an emphasis on surfacing the relatively raw outputs of various data aggregations. How many comments, followers, votes, signups, views, clicks, stars are questions commonly answered by social apps, and people using the application are expected to derive what they can from that.

But for my time, raw numbers leave application experiences stale and one-dimensional, defaulting to what computers prefer to offer rather than what works for non-calculator type people.

Where products really succeed, you’ll find a focus on creating great outcomes. That’s done by hooking up creative transformation of outputs (the raw numbers) into something that supports the needs and goals of the people using the software.

The examples in the ongoing Outputs vs. Outcomes series illustrate the difference better than my words can, and for each example I’ll declare it a win for Output or Outcome. Use the eponymous tag to find all posts on this theme, and call me out wherever you think I’m not being fair.

Kinzin’s Monthly Photos by Mail: Outcome Wins

Via Megan, I learned about a really cool service added to Vancouver-developed Kinzin: your top 10 photos are automatically printed and mailed out to people who prefer physical prints for just under $4 (to Canada; $3 in the US) by monthly subscription.

I haven’t gone through the execution yet, but it’s an instant win for Outcomes as a product concept: a low monthly fee lets you generate happiness out of your online activity for someone who can’t use the web. This passes the Kathy Sierra ‘Make your users rock’ test with flying colours. Congratulations to the Kinzin team.

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.