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I recently finished reading Geoffrey Moore’s tech marketing classic Crossing the Chasm. After finishing it, I can see why this was such a popular book when it came out in 1991. Coming from a design and ecology background devoid of marketing experience, I appreciated the easy-to-read primer for marketing disruptive technologies. Because of the stage I’m at with the ideas I’m thinking about lately, one of the most helpful sections was The Claim: Passing the Elevator Test. A few notes:

The elevator test: “Can you explain your product in the time it takes to ride up in  an elevator?”

Why it’s a bad sign if you can’t pass the elevator test (pg 152-153):

• Whatever your claim is, it cannot be transmitted by word of mouth.
• Your marketing communications will be all over the map.
• Your R&D will be all over the map.
• You won’t be able to recruit partners and allies.
• You are not likely to get financing from anybody with experience.

• For (target customers - beachhead segment only)
• Who are dissatisfied with (the current market offering)
• Our product is a (new product category)
• That provides (key problem-solving capability)
• Unlike (the product alternative)
• We have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application)

A high concept pitch distills a startup’s vision into a single sentence

…people should already understand the building blocks of the pitch: buses, bombs, Jaws, space, the seven deadly sins, Flickr, Firefox, MMOGs, et cetera. The pitch combines the building blocks by using analogy, synthesis, juxtaposition, combination, whatever; e.g. “Jaws in space.”

“Taking actions to create, grow, maintain or defend markets.”

“Winning at marketing more often than not means being the biggest fish in the pond. If we are very small, then we must search out a very small pond indeed.”

“Cross the chasm by targeting a very specific niche market where you can dominate from the outset, force your competitors out of that market niche, and then use it as a base for broader operations.”

“… because, confronted with the immensity of opportunity represented by a mainstream market, they lose their focus, chasing every opportunity that presents itself, but finding themselves unable to deliver a salable proposition to any true pragmatist buyer.”

“A vertical market with a broken mission-critical process creates an attractive beachhead opportunity… The more serious the problem, the faster the target niche will pull you out of the chasm.”

“Success through subtraction is the key lesson here. And that subtraction was made possible by a vote of confidence in design esthetics and in target marketing. By contrast, the companies who failed had over-designed for their target market because they were hedging their bets.”

“You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use.”

“Expect that the best scenarios will be ‘whole product challenged’ - if it were easy, someone else would have done it. Indeed, the fact that it is hard will create a barrier to entry in your favor once you have stepped up to the solution.”

“The best sub-segmentation is based on special interest groups within the general community. These typically are very tightly networked and normally form because they have very special problems to solve.”

“…your market alternative helps people identify your target customer (what you have in common) and your compelling reason to buy (where you differentiate). Similarly, your product alternative helps people appreciate your technology leverage (what you have in common) and your niche commitment (where you differentiate). Thus you create the two beacons that triangulate to teach the market your positioning.”

“…market alternatives call out the budget and thus the market category, and product alternatives call out the differentiation.”

“Time to establish a sustainable market position, and not cost or breadth of sales is your critical success factor. You simply cannot afford to lose one day of opportunity, and the only channel that would ever be that responsive to your needs is your own.”

An quote from László Moholy-Nagy’s 1947 book “Vision in Motion.”:

“The designer must see the periphery as well as the core, the immediate and the ultimate, at least in the biological sense. He must anchor his special job in the complex whole. The designer must be trained not only in the use of materials and various skills, but also in appreciation of organic functions and planning. He must know that design is indivisible, that the internal and external characteristics of a dish, a chair, a table, a machine, painting, sculpture are not to be separated…

There is design in organization of emotional experiences, in family life, in labor relations, in city planning, in working together as civilized human beings. Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: ‘design for life’.

Wish I had this quote for the presentation I gave last week. Thanks to 37Signals: Signal vs Noise for this one.

Yesterday I gave a brief talk about web design at the Pixel graphic design club Alumni Day at UC Davis. Here are some of the notes I wrote down when I was thinking about the talk. The slides for the talk are included below, but probably aren’t as meaningful without the verbal component.

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The complexity and reach of the projects I’m working on has increased exponentially since I graduated. But the questions and process to solve the problems are fundamentally the same. Design provides a framework that is rarely taught in schools: a method for creating intelligent solutions to complex problems.

My advice to you: embrace the fact that everything in your life can (and should?) be a design problem. Think beyond graphic design, exhibit design, fashion design. See the world from a more holistic perspective - the world is a place full of complex problems in need of intelligent solutions.

The projects I’m working on now will have contact with tens of millions of people. What makes me qualified to do this? What makes me think I can do this successfully? One answer: design. Problems get bigger, but the methods for solving them stay the same. Identify the goals, identify the constraints, learn enough about both to push the limits of what’s possible.

Here’s the other trick: it’s not magical. Yes, sometimes there is that spark, that moment of creative inspiration where everything falls into place. More often (and more important, when you’re expected to produce these solutions on a regular basis, not just when you happen to stumble upon an epiphany), it is the result of hard work and focused effort. There’s a lot of mediocre stuff out there. Mediocre design, mediocre products, mediocre people. If being exceptional was easy, everyone would do it. Unfortunately (or fortunately, for those who embrace the challenge), it’s much easier to be mediocre.

My challenge to you: Take what you’ve learned here, and remove the limits from your thinking. There’s plenty of complex problems out there in need of intelligent solutions. Take your design education and go solve a few, you’re better suited than most to do so.

I earned two degrees while I at UC Davis. One took 80% of my years here and 20% of my effort (Ecology). The other took 20% of my years here and 80% of my effort (Design). Looking back on it, I think I tired of my ecology program because there wasn’t much room for creativity. If you did the research and recorded the right numbers, and then put those numbers into the right equations, out came the results. You may not like the results, but there wasn’t much guesswork in the process.

Design, by contrast, forces you to ask questions and explore solutions. Some (many?) of the solutions will be novel, at least to you. How to pick one? There aren’t traditional “right” answers. Sure, design has “rules” but they’re not like the rules of physics - immutable and constant - in design, the possibility exists of breaking those rules, so long as you’re doing it appropriately and know what your doing. A favorite quote: “Rules are a substitute for poor skills of observation”. If you find yourself depending on the rules for guidance, maybe you need to work on your judgment and observation.

When picking these solutions, you can only choose the one that you think will best solve the problem within the constraints of the context.

When I went to Stanford for their annual entrepreneurship conference, I wished that I could have cloned myself and gone to more sessions. So many of the topics and panelists were relevant to the things I’m interested in right now. I was excited to hear that many of the sessions would be filmed and posted online. The best one I’ve found so far is Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, speaking about writing business plans and pitching VCs. The video isn’t embedable, but is available here.

I watched the video twice, once to listen and once to take notes. My notes are after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

During my last quarter at UC Davis, I worked on an independent study project to build a wiki focused on sustainable exhibit design - it’s now called the Green Design Wiki. I put it up on the web during the project and have updated it periodically since then. I checked the analytics for the site recently, and found it’s getting more traffic than expected. On March 22, Paul Orselli mentioned the wiki in his interview with Tim McNeil, the professor at UC Davis who was my advisor on the project. In the interview, Tim describes the wiki the we created:

Above and beyond the Design Museum website and exhibitions, the wiki is the most practical resource we can provide to the museum community. It is intended to provide a basic grounding in sustainable design concepts and initiate an ongoing dialogue about greening the exhibition design field. The array of materials and products is rapidly evolving, a wiki based platform is the best model for having others contribute and for keeping it current.

I hope the wiki has become a valuable resource to those that have stumbled upon it. Related to this goal, I recently came across the Huddler GreenHome site, a new community based around sustainable living products. After joining the site I realized that they might be interested in the Green Design Wiki - it turns out that the products used in exhibit design overlap in many areas with products required for the home (lighting, heating and cooling, paints and finishes, flooring, furniture…). After some quick work from their community manager, much of the content of the Green Design Wiki is now mirrored at GreenHome. Hopefully this will help spread the ideas on the wiki to as many people as possible.

I’ve been reading Emotional Design by Don Norman on and off for the last few weeks. Here’s some choice ideas from it that I thought were worth remembering:

Norman quotes Sergio Zyman, former CMO for Coca Cola: 

“Emotional branding is about building relationships; it is about giving a brand and a product long-term value… Emotional branding is based on that unique trust that is established with an audience. It elevates purchases based on need to the realm of desire. The commitment to a product or an institution, the pride we feel upon receiving a wonderful gift of a brand we love or having a positive shopping experience in an inspiring environment where someone knows our name or brings an unexpected gift of coffee - these feelings are at the core of Emotional Branding.” (pg 60)

“The principles for designing pleasurable, effective interaction between people and products are the very same ones that support pleasurable and effective interaction between individuals.”

After reading “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative” by Ken Robinson on and off for the last year, I finally finished the book on a plane flight home from San Diego tonight. Since I’ve spent so long finishing the book, my thoughts on it are biased toward the last few chapters:

“Creativity often comes about by making unusual connections, seeing, analogies, identifying relationships between ideas and processes that were previously not related. This is precisely why some of the most effective creative teams are interdisciplinary.” (pg 188)

This bit comes to me at an interesting time, as two weeks ago I was reading a post on Futuristic Play that discussed models of viral growth in Facebook applications. I was surprised to find graphs and models that were similar to those I worked with when I studied ecology. One important component of the post I was reading about viral growth discussed the difference between growth in an unlimited vs limited market - when growth models account for the 60 million or so user population of Facebook, they change from looking very healthy to showing a scary looking crash. Interesting to me, as these look eerily similar to the concept in ecology known as carrying capacity, and the crash idea similar to what happens when a species or ecosystem surpasses the carrying capacity of it’s environment. The similarities between these two ideas lead me to believe that there might be some useful overlap in models I studied in school as an ecology major and my current interest in social networks and web apps. Hopefully more to come on this in the near future (by hopefully I mean two things: 1) hopefully I’ll make more interesting connections and 2) that I’ll be able to write them down and post the them here). 

One more bit from Out of Our Minds, this time a bit that is applicable to challenges I’m working with at Affinity Labs as we grow from a small startup into a bigger division of Monster Worldwide:

“The most creative periods in the lives of organizations are often in the early stages of its work where there is a rush of excitement about the possibilities to be explored and before the organization itself has settled into fixed institutional structures and routines. Stimulating or reviving the creative impulse in organizations often requires that existing borders be perforated or dissolved so that ides can flow freely between different specialists who are too often kept apart from each other. The point of these collaborations is not for different specialists to impose their own ways of working on each other. It is to benefit from the stimulation of each other’s expertise” (pg 188)

It’s also worth noting that the reason that I started reading this book in the first place was because I watched Ken Robinson’s TEDtalk, which I found to be both entertaining and thought provoking. I include it here for convenience, but I recommend downloading the higher quality MP4 file from TED.

So after spending some time to migrate my blog from a $90/year hosted Typepad account to my self-hosted Wordpress install (since I’ve spent the last 6 months learning the basics of PHP this seemed much easier when I first looked into it last year), upgrading to WP 2.5, I’m finding myself inspired to start writing some things here again. Since I like to use this blog as a record of my own thoughts and work, I thought I’d share some recent work I’ve done. Last week we launched some new features on the Affinity Labs sites, probably the biggest release I’ve managed so far, and I’m pretty excited about the new UI we’ve created for our some of our channel pages and our article pages. First, the old design (thanks Google cache!)

And the new design:

isolation

Originally uploaded by alanwells

One of my favorite photos from college.

No Impact Man: “I am not realistic. I never want to be realistic. God save us all from realism, especially if it means we have to limit our vision for the world.”

Author Unknown: “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

William Drenttel: “Great design does not, in fact, come from compromise; it comes from strength of character, persistence of vision, and expertise.”

Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912): “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”

Tim Brown: “Inspiration. Where do ideas come from? Insights are the fuel of inspiration. You don’t get ideas from sitting at your desk. Use the world as a source of inspiration (not as a source of validation). It starts with empathy and seeing things from other people’s viewpoints, not yours. Aim to understand people on multiple levels: physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and culturally.”

Louis Pasteur: “Luck favors the prepared mind.”

Andy Rachleff: “Well I don’t believe that entrepreneurs are created, I think they are born… You can always hire execution, you can never hire vision.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly: “To be human means to be creative.”

Edward Albee: “Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of their way to come back a short distance correctly.”

Pablo Picasso: “[Work] below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”

David Cabianca: “Rules are used as a substitute for skills of observation.”

Steve Jobs: “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

Frank Gehry: “Is starting hard? You know it is.”

Richard Schoenwald: “I can’t lead the life of the mind in solitude, and neither can you, and together we defy the tyranny of change, and we escape being imprisoned by falseness and triviality, and we jointly venture onward.

Unknown: “To be bound to our own mistakes is the ultimate expression of freedom.”

From John Maeda’s Blog: “Your expression of anger … belies the qualities … of a lesser man.”