Remarks on The Speed of Trust

The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey is well-written, actionable advice on how to build your own credibility with others, and how to intelligently extend trust to others. There's a section on building trust in your own organization with external stakeholders. It's particularly timely as people have become deeply suspicious of institutions and of others. Recommended.

Business metrics for UX designers

UX designers would do well to learn about business metrics. Business metrics had been a gaping hole in my own education until recently. Companies tend to measure what they think is important. If the stuff you do doesn't track to something the company is measuring then you need to find out why. It could be that the company isn't good at measuring stuff. It could also mean that what you're doing isn't going to get a lot of attention, which isn't a good thing in a slow economy.

I've been working on a paper that explains business metrics to UX designers. Some day soon I'll get it submitted somewhere.

Business model generation

I sketch everything. Screens, call flows, processes, hierarchies, etc. It drives me crazy to be in a meeting and people are throwing ideas around and arguing and stating their points and not seeing the connections between things, and no one is trying to capture anything on a whiteboard. It so much easier to see the relationships between things when you write them on a board.

I was so delighted to find the book Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur. Here is a book that elevates the importance of sketching and group facilitation and design thinking to the highest importance in creating new business models. It has been out of print for a while but it's finally back. Highly recommended.

Innovate Carolina 2010

The Carolinas Chapter of Product Development and Management Association is organizing the Innovate Carolina conference on April 10 at UNC Kenan Flagler Business School. I'll be there.

When did "social media" come to mean "spam?"

I used to like to read and participate in some of the LinkedIn groups about design and human factors but lately it just all looks like "make money fast" schemes and diploma mills. Somebody sets up an account and joins about 50 groups and the spams every group with the same message once a month with a link to website that just screams Virus Central. If you look at the account there's never any information about the user and they have no Connections. Some group owners are good about kicking the spammers out, and other group owners don't seem to care.

In some cases, I think the spammers are just clueless individuals who read a poorly-written article about social media and have implementated the first idea that came into their heads.

Today's fire drill was, well, a fire drill

Today's helpful tip from the Helpful Tip guy. This one's a little more subtle than my last helpful tip: don't throw frozen iguanas in the back seat of your station wagon. Anyway, today's tip is:

Don't operate a blowtorch near a smoke detector

If you do, the fire alarm will go off and the building will be evacuated, and everyone's work will be disrupted, and the fire department will arrive. So don't do that. Please.

Best user interface certification

I see a lot of questions from user interface designers about the "best" certification for designers. Truth is, there isn't a highly regarded certification for UI designers. I know that a private company, Human Factors International, grants a "certified usability analyst" credential, but it looks to me like an entry-level certification. It doesn't account for experience or the ability to actually design a user interface, which is documented in a portfolio.

A better certification for designers is the PMP certification from the Project Management Institute. One of the knocks I hear against a lot of designers is that they don't know how to work projects. Studying for and passing the PMP test addresses that concern.

It's important for designers to understand how to navigate projects in order to deliver their service effectively. I worked a company that offered free PMP training and paid for its people to take the certification test. The company understood the importance of having all of its people know how to operate in projects. Unfortunately, my supervisor at the time didn't understand. "You can't take that training, it doesn't have anything to do with your job," I was told. I took the test some years later, and wished that I had done it earlier.