Posts tagged “Silicon Valley”

Can you engineer empathy (as part of learning to code)?

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From Engineering Empathy [Re/code]

Dev Bootcamp, an intensive nine-week coding program in San Francisco’s South of Market district, offers a unique “Engineering Empathy” curriculum. About 30 students stood in pairs and spoke to their partners simultaneously: You don’t respond to email fast enough. Why are you checking Twitter — nothing important happens there. You’re too old to be here. You’re faking it. You don’t know how to develop. You have no career. You’re the worst pair partner. Your accent makes you hard to understand. You’ll never get a programming job.

When the cacophony finally subsided, many of the would-be programmers were in tears. Some were holding hands. One man sat down and put his head in his hands. “My superego runs on a disappointment platform,” he said to the room.

The culture of tech (male-dominated, sexist, entitled and so on) has become even more visible as of late. Even the parodies of Silicon Valley, such as HBO’s Silicon Valley, face criticism for not being inclusive enough.

So I’m a bit stuck on how to parse this particular example. Of course it’s good that people are given the chance to develop empathy! I’ve been teaching designers about presence and mindfulness (and will be doing so again later this year at UX Australia). Perhaps it’s just how the writer took something earnest and presented it out of context, thereby making it look ridiculous (in other words, like a scene from Silicon Valley).

I suppose things can be both wonderfully beneficial and hilariously ridiculous at the same time (see rock music or romance, for example). I’ve taught a lot of workshops where you if walked in without context you’d wonder what the hell is going on. I feel trepidation (because I can’t tell how whether this is authentic or just a put-on) but I really want to recognize this as a good thing.

Good and bad ideas in the daily paper

Adam Richardson recently wrote a strong critique of the San Francisco Chronicle – both their unattractive redesign and their poor content.

Although Monday’s Chron featured anti-elitist sneering about Nate Silver’s semi-failed Oscar predictions, I was impressed with a new feature, where startups get feedback about their ideas from venture capitalists.

They’ve done a good job at tying this coverage to a unique aspect of the San Francisco Bay Area:

Silicon Valley, long known as a hotbed for innovation, has one of the highest concentrations of startups and investors in the world. At any one time, 20,000 entrepreneurs in the valley are thinking about starting companies, and as many as 8,000 are circulating business plans and looking for funding

One example: Mojamix: Breakfast enthusiasts personalize their own cereal or granola online and have it shipped to their door in just a few days.

David Pakman, partner, Venrock: I’m skeptical that consumers at scale actually know enough about what ingredients go together to make a breakfast cereal or granola they will like and will taste good. If I pick dried cranberries over raisins, will I like it less or more? Kinda have to taste it to know.

Mass customization of food products is indeed an interesting trend, but I wonder if it is better to focus on areas where the customer does not have to taste it to know if they will like it.

Margins in food products are low and are thus only interesting at scale, so Mojamix would need to demonstrate that the lifetime value of a customer is large enough to afford the customer acquisition costs that would be required to attract lots of customers.

As I’ve written before, I appreciate the ability of some VCs to look at an idea and consider many facets and contexts.

Sure, this sort of material is available elsewhere, especially online, but seeing this piece in the mainstream media was refreshing.

It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken

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The other day we went to JumpSpace for a JumpTalk by Chuck Darrah about the work featured in his (along with James M. Freeman and Jan English-Lueck) new book Busier Than Ever!: Why American Families Can’t Slow Down

Busier Than Ever! follows the daily activities of fourteen American families. It explores why they are busy and what the consequences are for their lives. Busyness is not just a matter of personal time management, but of the activities we participate in and how each of us creates “the good life.” While numerous books deal with efficiency and the difficulties of balancing work and family, Busier Than Ever! offers a fresh approach. Busyness is not a “problem” to be solved-it is who we are as Americans and it’s redefining American families.

Chuck gave a compellingly accessible talk peppered with stories from their in-depth fieldwork (like something about of Albert Brooks’ Real Life, they spent a huge amount of time with these families, becoming unavoidably involved with their lives. So different than doing “an interview” as is typical in consulting work).

He handed me a copy of the book, so I’ve got some reading to do, but some cool themes/behaviors he told us about (and this is my scribbly documentation and doesn’t necessarily fully represent their work)

  • Everything is work…but what is work? Some companies take 2 hours off to play Dungeons and Dragons, other folks go get a tan. There are stories as to why that is part of work for the people concerned. People define boundaries, proclaim that they don’t take home work with them, but when asked about the briefcase they are hauling out of the office, they explain what category of activity (i.e., reading HR memos) they will do at home that is not work.
  • People are taking on more stuff, by choice, but present busyness as an external force
  • Coping strategies have emerged (but I wonder if these are in fact the creators of the increased busyness?)
  • Planning and routinizing – time spent planning the day or working out processes for dealing with daily activities
  • Communicating – seemingly trite phone calls to check in about the plans already made
  • Anticipating – energy put into coming up with contingency plans – “what if this happens?” or “what if that happens?”
  • Adjusting – being flexible (with layers of power embedded in those negotiations), making last minute changes to the plans already developed and communicated
  • Protection – i.e., create a phantom meeting to keep blocks of time free for whatever purpose
  • Intelligence gathering – you don’t know what info will end up being relevant, so knowing what is going on with coworkers or family members becomes crucial
  • Simplifying – One father looked at every item in the house once per month and if he didn’t know what it was, it went to the dump or Goodwill immediately
  • Chunking – using interstitial times to accomplish tasks, i.e., moving items out of a meeting agenda into hallway conversations (although this isn’t always successful depending on the person and the task)

Ultimately, Chuck told us, it’s not about time, it’s about activities.

Meanwhile, a story that struck me a few weeks ago referred to a study (funded by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, as was the Darrah et. al work above) about convenience food.

the researchers saw that convenience foods weren’t used as a time-saving substitute for the same dish made from scratch. Instead packaged foods offered a way for families to eat more elaborate meals than they would normally have time to prepare.

When families did cook from scratch, they ate simpler fare — like one-pot meals or stir-fry. In the end, dinner took about a half-hour to an hour to prepare, whether it was made from scratch or with convenience foods.

The study showed that meals with little or no convenience foods took 26 to 93 minutes to prepare. Meals that used a lot of convenience foods took 25 to 73 minutes to prepare. While convenience foods were time-savers on very elaborate meals, overall, there was no statistically significant difference in total preparation time.

One difference that emerged was “hands on” time — the amount of time people spent slicing, dicing and stirring foods. Using convenience foods shaved about 10 minutes of hands-on time, but it didn’t make any difference in how quickly the food got to the table.

The study authors noted that the biggest time savings of convenience foods may be at the grocery store, where it’s faster to grab a frozen entree than to collect six separate ingredients to make the same dish from scratch. Grocery-shopping time wasn’t measured in the study. The average American spends about 22 minutes in the grocery store and shops about twice a week, according to the Food Marketing Institute.

Convenience foods also helped cooks offer a greater variety of dishes; cooks who made dinner from scratch offered three or fewer dishes. One family made a simple meal of sandwiches and edamame, using bread, cheese, greens and salmon and tomatoes. That meal took about a half-hour to prepare. Another family had a six-dish convenience-food meal of microwave barbecued ribs, macaroni and cheese, prebagged salad, bagged dinner rolls and a cookies and ice cream dessert. That meal also took a half-hour.

Context is everything

Designing Sustainable Mobility is an event recently held at Art Center in Southern California. In Northern California (i.e., Silicon Valley) an design-y event about mobility (sustainable or otherwise), is going to be about wireless communications (i.e. cell phone stuff). In Southern California, it’s about cars.

Although, now that I think of it, a conference about sustainability and wireless mobility would be interesting, since I don’t ever hear of the two things put together.

Under the Radar: video startups

Under the Radar is a showcase of early-stage innovation. Events feature several companies in one sector presenting to a panel of VC judges. Judges and attendees pick the company most likely to succeed and discuss the future of the presenting companies’ industry sector.

Last night I attended my first such event, hosted by Orange R&D. There were actually 7 companies, and the panel didn’t in fact make any overall picks.

Living and working in Silicon Valley means that I’m not immune from lingo like “burn rate”, “angel-funded”, “series-A”, “[something]-play”, “the eBay of [something]” and beyond, but this was my first formal in-depth exposure to this scene.

The companies shown were podaddies (dynamic video ad network), CastTV (video search), Veodia (enterprise video distribution), Nexage (video on mobile phones), Eyespot (editing/mashing up video on the web), ComVu (mobile video sharing), and OneCast (turnkey venue-based video).

The ideas were all very different and so some just were more easily explained than others, some were better presenters than others. Some were prepared to pitch to investors, others like CastTV were funded using money from their previous startup and there was an interesting comment about not wanting to bother with dealing with investors this time around. Isn’t that a sign of the latest dot-com economy; that companies can do a lot without millions of dollars?

Some folks were slick, some were slick but without merit (the video editing tool that was framed as telling stories since stories are important but offered nothing more than a way to butt clips together and overlay music – that’s not storytelling, sorry).

But the greatest part was the panel – it was a neat form of a crit, really. They asked great questions, shared their own concerns, picked on the weak, challenged the strong, and just emitted so much wisdom and experience (without much attitude) that I was very impressed. I mean, that’s the job of a venture capitalist, to be able to assess new companies based on having seen a million others, but for me to get to see that live and in the flesh was very neat.

There was little discussion of culture, or users; it was mostly about technology and markets, but that’s okay, I learned a bit just being part of it.

MC SP was in da house

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(thanks Katie for the photo)
Friday was the Bay Area’s Best awards, where local winners of the BusinessWeek/IDSA IDEA Awards were feted. I presented the awards. Below are my opening remarks.

In preparing for tonight I’ve been doing some thinking about design in the Bay Area. I’m sure we’ve all had that same experience where we’re on call to our friends and colleagues in other places to try and offer some detailed overview of the local economy for design, consulting, innovation, or whatever. “What’s going on with business out there?” they’ll ask us.

Ummm, well, let’s see.

I mean, how do you answer that?

If you’re like me, you can really only answer it from your own narrow perspective. If you’re having a busy week, you might tell them “The Valley is back!” or if you’re feeling some economic crunch from your employer or your clients, you might just pause and inhale skeptically….”hisssssssssssssssssss. I dunno….”

Of course, we’re all optimists in Sunny (make that Foggy) California, so there’s probably a tendency to lean a bit harder on the “We’re back, baby” side of the equation.

So while I’m sure there’s someone with bar charts, and pie charts, showing the quarterly delta of the Gross Regional Product, design dollars spent per hard good, the macroeconomic tracking index of supply-and-demand curve adjusted for inflation, that’s not me. I can only tell you what I see and hear.

So if you will allow, let’s consider three different aspects of design: people, ideas, and stuff.

Okay, “people”. First of all, look at all of us. A bunch of people who are here tonight for outa-control alcohol fueled mayhem, to raise the roof with each other, for camaraderie, and celebration. To be out with each other and share the connection as part of the scene. We’re here for ourselves, but we’re here for each other. That’s a community. That’s something we know that people move here be part of. If you’ve got friends in other countries or other parts of the US, they may be jealous of that elusive “activity” that goes on here, at events like this and others. If you look at resumes you know that people definitely want to come HERE to work.

One of the largest employers of designers in the world is here…IDEO. With most of their designers here in the Bay Area. Just by mass alone, IDEO puts us all on the map.

We’ve got design students here, with programs at Academy of Art University, California College of the Arts (where I teach), San Francisco State, San Jose State, Stanford and probably someplace else I missed. Those schools are destination schools, and this area is a destination. And certainly the changes going on at CCA and Stanford are well-publicized in the design press, and even in the business press.

So, what about ideas? With Silicon Valley, we’ve got a tremendous history as a place of ideas, ideas that get turned into technologies and of course stuff that people end up using, in other words, design. If you aren’t getting a chunk of the money, you might not think at first that the $1.65 BILLION that Google paid for YouTube doesn’t really affect you, but don’t be mistaken – that’s a dramatic sign about money, content, media, information, entertainment, you name it. Oh, and of course, design.

But the air is thick with ideas here in the Bay Area. Earlier this week I saw a panel discussion with Larry Cornett and Joy Mountford from Yahoo, Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path, and Tim Brown from IDEO. They were considering the design challenges in creating a new class of product: systems with emergent behavior. In other words, where the way the product or system will be used isn’t known before it is created, and the design must allow for that flexibility to emerge over time. Maybe you’d like to dismiss all this as website stuff, but Tim Brown was very clear that he didn’t distinguish; it was all design to him.

And people from outside this area are hungry to bring their ideas here to teach us, and to get our reactions. Just in the last few weeks, we’ve had MOMA design curator Paola Anontelli at Stanford talking about designing the user experience of design exhibits, author and visionary Bruce Sterling at CCA talking about modernism, futurism, and design, Molly Steenson at Giant Ant talking about an ethnographic study she did with Microsoft in Bangalore, India, looking at how people use mobile phones. Turns out that whereas we see the phones as personal devices, for many in India they are shared devices. The design implications for software and hardware in the global marketplace are significant.

And last but absolutely not least comes the stuff. Consider that the talk about emergent systems I mentioned before was held in an overflowing auditorium at PARC, the famous R&D lab in Palo Alto that brought us word processing, the desktop interface, Ethernet, the laser printer, and helped to productize the mouse. We are residents in the ancestral home of revolutionary products, services, technologies – in other words, stuff – the personal computer, the internet, the iPod, the search engine. Revolutionary in that they change how people live, how they work, they create entire economies and destroy others.

And the stuff is why we’re here tonight, after all. Each of the firms we are honoring tonight have a “thing” that we’ll show, a thing that can be seen and touched. But each of those tangible things should mean so much more than the thing itself. The people in our winning firms have taken big ideas, new ideas, and put them into stuff. People, ideas, and stuff, and that’s how we got here, with our Bay Area’s Best.

The event was a lot of fun, although they ran out of beer (I was saving myself until after the awards, and made a dash for the bar only to find they were pushing this malt-beverage-with-caffeine that would have turned me into Portigolio with my shirt over my head) and I had to make do with a churro instead. It was really a party, more than a ceremony, and so lots of people continued to chat, loudly, while we began to speak through the PA. It’s very hard to speak when there’s so much background chatter, and I heard from others afterwards that it was a struggle for some to hear the presentations. I don’t begrudge anyone the desire to continue talking (that’s what’s great about parties) but it would be great if it could be managed so that the speaking-and-listening stuff could also go on as well.

Rambling thoughts on “User Research Strategies: What Works, What Does Not Work”

Last night’s BayCHI event was a good experience. A panel of champions of user research (Director, Manager, Lead, etc.) at key Silicon Valley companies (Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Intuit, and eBay) attracted a large and energetic crowd. The pre-meeting dinner was extremely well-attended. It felt like the discipline is having a good moment in the zeitgeist.

Each panelist gave a 10-minute summary of what’s going on at their firm. What types of methods they are using, how they are feeding design, strategy. How they might interface with market research and other areas of the business. Where they have been, historically, and what may have changed in how they are embraced (or not).

Rashmi Sinha moderated, and only spent a bit of time asking her own followup questions after the panelists finished; and then it was basically an hour (?) of audience questions. Although I stood up and asked a question, I would rather have had more questions from her and less from the audience (that’s my bias, I guess, as someone who’s played that role in the past); the audience questions are not usually about creating conversation, and the moderator is obviously in a role to do that. By the time we finished with questions people were asking about how to recruit participants for studies; a tactical question that had no place in this meeting, if we were there to discuss the practice and how it integrates into corporate America, then let’s not deal with newbie process questions. I’m not minimizing the importance of that question to the person who asked it, but it wasn’t on topic and kinda brought things down for me.

People mumbled afterwards about wanting to see some conflict between the panelists, who represented competitive firms (but maybe didn’t see themselves individually as competitors) and who sometimes expressed different points of view on how to use the tools of user research (it’s hard for me to be specific from memory, but there were several examples from Google about how user research wasn’t always necessary, but they were ridiculous examples, as in, “should we have told people not to build a search interface until they had done years of research” as the strawman questions, when I don’t think anyone was advocating years of research, more so the opposite). It wasn’t in panelists charge to debate what they heard from the others; they were there to tell their own story and they all did that very well.

Perhaps the comments about conflict are proxies for my desire for more conversation; something that (as user reseachers know) takes good questions, and frankly, audience members just aren’t going to ask good questions. This sounds terribly snobby and let me clarify – there are questions that are informational (what type of deliverables do you use? how do you recruit) and there are questions that provoke conversation and interaction.

There’s another panel phenomenon at work here – “question drift” – whoever answers the question first is the most on target; as other answers come from the panelists, we end up hearing about an entirely different question, and we’ve lost the thread. I don’t have a solution to this. Sometimes the drift is interesting, but often it’s just a bit frustrating.

So it was hard to take much specific away from the evening – there was a lot of info; a lot of bits of perspective and insight and jargon thrown out quickly, with something new on the heels, so I felt like it was an immersion more than an education.

But here’s what I took away:

  • this is a mature field; you can see the newer practices (Google) presented as adolescent next to their more wizened counterparts
  • I’ve lived as a consultant for a very long time; there’s a whole set of challenges and benefits that these corporate folks have that are almost alien to me – I felt very aware of how I can deal with some of their situations so much more easily, and how there’s so much more formalized and permanent processes being created that I’m not at all engaged with
  • it’s just tradeoffs and contrast, one isn’t better than the other, we need to be in-house and out-of-house both
  • it’s not clear to me how research is different from design (and I don’t mean Research and Design) – this was my question and I don’t know that I got an answer except a fallback to corporate structures (and one person pointed out that designers and researchers have very different skill sets, but that wasn’t my question – if this is collaborative work, can’t teams of people with complementary skills deliver ONE thing – “design” – rather than breaking it down so much) and formalized processes
  • this is a bit of a hot topic among software/tech/design types right now
  • MORE I REMEMBERED: Christian Rohrer from eBay defined success criteria for user research as impact (which I really liked), and he defined impact as
    1. credibility
    2. consumability
    3. relevance

looking forward, looking backward

You can’t look forward without looking backwards. LukeW writes about Web2.0 – a buzzword that some will be sick of already while others have certainly never heard before. Luke’s soundbites are likely only to confuse those outside the geekstream, but I’ll say that to me it refers to (and maybe this is obvious) the next era or (ulp) paradigm shift in dot-com companies. I suspect this meme is connected to the story about Silicon Valley being “back” (in terms of VC money, IPOs, new companies, jobs, and just general dot-com-type excitement).

An important and timely companion to thinking ahead is to look at where we’ve been. Kevin Kelly, writing in Wired, looks back at 10 years of the Internet in We Are The Web. Elsewhere in that issue is an excellent timeline that ironically doesn’t seem to be available online.

Saffo speaks

As part of the David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series at Stanford, Paul Saffo from the Institute for the Future spoke briefly last night, in a talk entitled The case of the blind venetians; reflections on innovation and what makes Silicon Valley tick

Saffo is a great speaker, lots of anecdotes and metaphors and implications and sidebars, so any attempt to summarize is going to be incredibly flat. Nevertheless, it was a simplistic story he told: in essence that Silicon Valley is a specialized version of the California myth, which is a distillation of the American Dream (that’s my synthesis, as you’ll see, he didn’t quite say that)

Loose notes:

In the history of Silicon Valley there have been so many innovations. We lurch from failure to failure, we know how to fail. The death of the Interactive TV industry had programmers and technologies just waiting, so the Web industry was able to move right into the same place.

Bad management is good for innovation (looking at all the famous Silicon Valley companies that are badly managed, i.e., Steve Jobs). Good management kills innovative ideas. Don’t read management books.

What does the culture of this area (Silicon Valley) offer up in terms of how we accept failure? We permit failure, unlike Seattle, France, or Sweden, where one failure can tar a reputation forever, going bankrupt can bring shame. There are consequences to failure here, but they aren’t lethal.

But why here? Why does it keep repeating?

California is a place that is fueled by dreams, against all odds. Consider the meme of California even going back to Spanish literature of 1500s – originally envisioned as an island, but despite multiple proofs that it was indeed part of the mainland, the idea that it is an island continued to appear on maps for many years – decades and more.

As trite as it sounds, California is still a place where dreams are believed to come true. From the Gold Rush, Hollywood, early aviation – many of which started elsewhere in the US but took strongest root in California, and despite the fact that success came to very few of those who tried, the story of the dream persists.

For innovators, you have to kid yourself, because if you looked at things realistically, you’d give up. Keep the dream alive.

DryBay


Founded in the heart of Silicon Valley, DryBay.com provides professional dry-cleaning, laundry, and alteration services to your doorstep.

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