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“In the connected-world era, links are by far more important than technology … this is how our brain works by the way”
Do we need a Chief Social Officer?
Social is an experience for the company that goes side-by-side with the organization: it’s a way to broaden the possibility to achieve results.
Social is not an option. If your company is on the market:
- people inside companies is collaborating faster and faster in a way that goes beyond the standardized procedures;
- people outside companies is already talking about the company, is inventing stuff relating to your company, is making and sharing stuff thinking of your brand … and it’s probably doing it outside your sight.
- … and, and this even more powerful (or scary, it’s up to you do decide
), the barrier between inside and outside is getting thinner and thinner.
PierG
Like this:
When a SW project finish, a Project Manager is a happy, a company can send the bill and … the team moves to another project leaving the code to the lucky maintenance team.
Is the project team deeply motivated to build a product who can last for long? Is the maintenance team skilled (and willing and has the right incentive) to make the system working better and better?
Mmmm….
Here is a possible recipe:
Form long-lived teams around applications/products, or sets of features. A team works from a prioritised backlog of work that contains a mix of larger initiatives, minor enhancements, or BAU-style bug fixes and maintenance. Second-level support should be handled by people in the product team. Everyone in the team should work with common process and a clear understanding of technical design and business vision.
via Projects are evil and must be destroyed | Evan Bottcher.
What do you think?
PierG
What happens when technology cycles become shorter than corporate decision cycles?
via Business Models and the Singularity | Digital Tonto (see also Facebook, Instagram and the Singularity)
My feeling is that that moment happened 5 years ago in big corporations: IT technology is already changing at a rate Coporate IT and Corporations cannot handle.
What’s the solution?
PierG
Like this:
I’ve collected some resources about “UX and friends” and I want to share them with you. I hope they can inspire or be helpful!
Usability Design Considerations for Web Forms
http://www.onextrapixel.com/2012/04/13/usability-design-considerations-for-web-forms/
The Death of the Wireframe? Towards An Integrated Approach to UX Design
http://www.fabernovel.com/en/blog/284-the-death-of-the-wireframe-towards-an-integrated-approach-to-ux-design
The New Google+ Is More Beautiful Than Facebook
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669497/the-new-google-is-more-beautiful-than-facebook-but-it-doesn-t-matter
PierG
Like this:
I’ve collected some resources about “UX and friends” and I want to share them with you. I hope they can inspire or be helpful!
10 Most Popular Drawing iPhone Apps 2012
http://smashinghub.com/10-most-popular-drawing-iphone-apps-2012.htm
How ‘Lean UX’ Can Improve Application Development
http://www.cio.com/article/703557/How_Lean_UX_Can_Improve_Application_Development?taxonomyId=3172&page=1
Organizational Challenges for UX Professionals
http://uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/04/organizational-challenges-for-ux-professionals.php
Designing For Mobile – Best Practices for Superior User Experiences
http://www.the-cma.org/about/blog/designing-for-mobile
PierG
The title of this posts is probably meaningless to you (but if you know what it is, just let me know using the comments ) but reminds me of a good time.
Yes sometimes good times come, not many usually, but they come.
I think our culture is too focused on learning through mistakes, looking at problems or failures. There is a lot of hype around the fail early paradigm. I’m not against it and I think we must start getting more from our success stories and moments.
So (1) celebrate! Yes Sir, when you do something good, you are successfully do celebrate. It’s not a sin. It’s good for our self, for our self estime, for our colleagues, for our family too. Smile. Be happy!
(2) learn. What went well? What can you do differently? But above all what was the key success factor of this success? Our brain stick to these emotions and you don’t need to be beaten to learn. Forget it. Learn from success!
(3) after a successfully project or task or … use this positive power, this power moment, to study something new. Maximize this learning moment studying something new: add a new arrow to your weapons.
PierG
This is the story of a manager, an engineer, who was very efficient. He was efficient, his team was efficient: they were operationally great.
Once he hired a brand new employee called Giammy: he was not an engineer, and he was very passionate. People seemed to be very good, very fast, very efficient: they were able to produce at almost constant speed and quality. Every problem was quickly solved and the ‘errors’ canceled getting back the flow to his std behaviour. But .. he couldn’t understand why the products of his new company where so … average. I mean yes, good, with low operative expenses but … average. And in fact the company was loosing market share. But they were very efficient.
One day the boss of the manager asked him to be more efficient because … he had to cut costs (due to the lack of revenues for average products).
So the manager asked Giammy to look into the problem and Giammy passionately started to ask questions, to propose new ideas, to change procedures . Yes the things Giammy was doing were not straight but he had so much passion and was able to involve his colleagues.
But the boss used to say to him “Giammy, the line is the shortest path from A to B. Be more efficient. Be more precise”.
And Giammy kept pushing and jumping from one idea to another, changing path, mixing and matching. And the boss “Giammy, I like you passion but, you know, passion is inefficient”.
And the company closed.
PierG
p.s. I am an engineer
Our Public National TV (RAI TV) is not known in Italy for being highly innovative.
But … it has an interesting set of option in the streaming side that’s, as far as I know, unique (and free!!) in Italy.
You can see almost anything on any channel live in streaming just going to the site www.rai.tv: here is the channel 1 link as an example.
The real time streaming is also visible on iOS (not tested on Android but I guess it works) without any extra app.
You can see, for free, almost all the shows from the previous week for channels 1,2,3 and 5 going to the RAI Replay site (here RAI 1 as an example).
Some of the shows are stored for on demand streaming (as an example a piece of SanRemo 2012).
Of course there is streaming for the Radio channels and special web events are available.
For some (very few for now as far as I know) events there is also an HD streaming available.
Not bad, congrats!
PierG
Courtesy of me'nthedogs, Some Rights Reserved
You know, engines for race cars are very important: they give you power and speed to win races.
But have you ever driven a car on ice? No matter how soft on the pedal you are, it seems that all that power causes a lot of troubles … so you end up spinning around
That’s the same concept for race cars: if you have the most powerful engine but it is un-drivable you end up losing races maybe not being able to accelerate out of corners due to the high amount of wheelspin.
I think you have a similar effect with user interfaces of our applications: you may have the most powerful software to solve a specific problem but if your user experience sucks … your app sucks and sorry but you are going to lose: as easy as that.
PierG
Like this:
Last Wednesday I had the chance to go and see the last session of MMove by Carlo Ratti.
Here is my live tweeting, if you are interested:
| Carlo Ratti at #MMove #ReggioEmilia #CentroMalaguzzipic.twitter.com/CTR3o1Rg |
| Senseable cities #MMove #ReggioEmilia #CarloRatti |
| What are smart cities? |
| Opppsssss … what’s that? #MMove pic.twitter.com/I5iEq41S |
| Cities are 2% of the planet it 80% of emissions |
| We can compare people walking in a town (tracking their mobile) and the path of bus and taxis (with device installed) |
| Can we foresee a time when a bus can come depending on where the crowd is? |
| What if in a certain moment it rains in a portion of the city? We might send taxis there |
| What if we put a tag on rubbish and we track where they are going? The removal chain! pic.twitter.com/mj65bmz5 |
| It’s incredible how each piece of rubbish travel all over the US!! |
| We put some sw on old PCs that are sent to third world countries to see where they go, to tell theirstories |
| User generated content, like pictures on Flickr that have many tags, can be used for example to see where Americans go when in Italy |
| Looking at colors in picture (on Flickr) you can for example see areas that are more dry or where there are more parties in RT |
| you’ in between physical infrastructure and the digital infrastructure pic.twitter.com/g2jooLzx |
| Smart wheel (for bicycles): energy recovery, regenerative breaking, fitness reading … and lot of sensors connected |
| The best idea? Is the one that you can physically show! #ShowDontTell |
| CO, NOx, noise exposure sensors on the smart wheel |
| How can architecture change thanks to these sensors-feedback new mechanism? |
| A designer thinks of how people will work with his creature: reality will give surprises anyway |
| Obama campaign tought us that we can move from digital, the crowd, to physical |
| Using the accelerometer of our smartphones we can deduce the kind of transportation you are using (and how much CO2 u are producing) |
| The conference room at Centro Malaguzzi #MMove #ReggioEmiliapic.twitter.com/1DfQkeSZ |
PierG
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