I posted an example of how bad branding by committee can be. But committees are not alone in their capacity to produce crap.

I used to work for a publishing company many years ago. The owner would bring in graphics done by his nephew for our opinion. They were without exception, attrocious. Of course we lied. But we were careful not to lie so strongly that the owner would actually consider putting his newphew on staff. Forever more we called all bad graphic arts, nephew art.

Looks like more than just a few nephews have been busy making logos for hockey teams:

http://mirtle.blogspot.com/2006/09/worst-hockey-logos-of-all-time.html

Oh the humanity!

It feels like I’ve been fighting an uphill battle about what design really is and is not. Time for another round…

It pains me to read someone claim that people who can draw well are good designers. It pains me even more to read this nonsense repeated by one of my favourite blogs. *sigh*

Folks design is not about drawing. Design is an endeavour to model and solve the problems people experience. Drawing, on the other hand, is about expression and communication. It has no necessary connection with problem analysis or solution synthesis. And even when drawing proves to be an important design tool, drawing skill is largely irrelevant.

Here’s some purely anecdotal evidence. I know people who are wonderful illustrators, but have no ability to grasp experiential problems nor to think of new solutions. I also know people who can reveal incredible insights into problems and concieve of brilliant solutions, but couldn’t draw to save their lives.

As Despair.com says, none of us are as dumb as all of us. The mathematics of group dynamics seems to agree. If I have half a brain, and you have half a brain, and George down the hall has half a brain, that comes to just over 1/10 of a whole brain (.5 x .5 x .5 = .0125).

So, what do you get when you apply that kind of brain power to branding? Well you get this.

I have a new HP, and IE’s search shows what can only be described as brand diarrhea. Good Lord! Am I using AOL, HP, Compaq, Google, Microsoft?? Why not throw in Burger King and Restoration Hardware as well? AOL?!?! How the hell did that get on my computer? And did you notice that 1/3 of all the words are “search”?? I realize this is a search tool because I clicked on IE’s search button. Jesus, even I’m not that forgetful.

This is so craptacular it could only have come from a committee.

(speaking of the stupidity multiplcation table, what happens when you multiply failure by failure? Well Ford and GM might be about to show us)

I’m sure this is frequently complained about elsewhere. So now its my turn. I am increasingly offended by blatent corporate blog astroturfing. IBM provides two great examples of bullshit in blog’s clothing.

The first is thier Next Level Blog 2006, a blog ostensibly about innovation. And the second is HealthNex. This one particularly bad. I haven’t found a single post that isn’t a commercial for the corporation or some corporate product.

I don’t really have a point with this, other than it makes me mad. Grr.

Its hard to really know for sure if this is true viable, it is a fascinating new approach to air travel from a purely technological perspective. While this may not the perfect solution, we need a lot more thinking like this in aviation, healthcare, government, everywhere.

watch:

In my effort to ripoff myself, I thought I’d start by outlining what i mean by innovation and other related terms.

My working definition of innovation refers to a capitalization on new business opportunities through new products, services, processes or experiences (collectively referred to simply as product hereafter). New ideas that cannot be tied to business opportunities may be wonderfully creative, but ultimately inert in terms of capitalization, and so fail my working definition.

Opportunities are situations that afford both a chance to create value for someone or something at a profit in some new or unique way, and a chance to achieve and maintain a position of competitive advantage.

Now here is where things get a little controversial. I believe that people and organizations are more strongly averse to pain than they are attracted to pleasure. This negative motivation means that one will most consistently provide higher value by helping to alleviate pain. This is of course a philosophical position I cannot (yet) prove with empirical evidence.

I’m defining pain to refer to a problem that 1) costs a subject time, money and/or attention, 2) the subject experiencing the problem accurately recognizes it, and 3) the problem is sufficiently acute to warrant spending time, money, and/or attention to alleviate it.

Pain then boils down to cost, in terms of time, money and attention (and in the case of consumers, perhaps personal ego as well). If the cost to alleviate the pain is less than the cost of living with it, we have ourselves a business opportunity ripe for a great new innovation to capitalize on. Please forgive the Fischer-Price economics—I’m just trying to lay some very basic definitions.

Costs drive Pain > Pain drives Opportunity > Opportunity drives Innovation
Under this interpretation, necessity really is the mother of invention.

With consumers it appears most (if not all) pains are costs related to at least one of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (or another needs hierarchy like Clayton Alderfer’s ERG). Henry spends a lot of money on diet books because he feels that his weight is costing him more in terms of belongingness than the books cost financially. Buying these books is his way to solve the pain of not belonging to his perception of a certain group.

These definitions raise further questions, such as:

• Other than pain what else can give rise to business opportunities?
• Should focusing on pain differ between consumers and businesses (what pain does the iPod solve? and is that why people are snapping them up?)
• Are there pains other than time/money/attention/ego costs that give rise to business opportunities?
• Does something like Maslow seem appropriate for classifying pains?
• Could it provide some insight into pains in order to drive innovative solutions, or is it just too academic?
• Is there a similar needs hierarchy for business customers, or does Maslow apply to businesses too?

Niblettes is 1 year old now. Isn’t that like middle-aged in the blogosphere?
(did I really say ‘blogoshphere?)

So for my next couple of posts, I will dust off a few of my very early posts and see how they’ve held up over the past year.

This might be the coolest video I’ve seen online. Sure kids these days might have mySpace, but we had funked up Stevie Wonder singing Superstition live on Sesame Street.

What does this have to do with design or innovation? Well watch the video and compare it to, say, the VMA. On the one hand we have an increidbly cool, intimate and authentic experience. On the other we have generic, prefabbed, homogenized posing. What is an authetic, from the heart, expereince worth to you?

(yes folks, those are real musicians playing real instruments, live. who knew?)

watch:

Ok, i fully admit that this is a totally cheating post: I originally posted this over at The Healthcare IT Guya few weeks ago. However with CardinalHealth’s recent problems with the FDA over one of thier infusion pumps, I think it’s important to reiterate my post. Why? Because the FDA acted on CardinalHealth not because of some technical failing of the device, but because a failing of interaction design. It seems that the design of the physical input mechanism increases the potential for a particular kind of data input error. So this is a case where a trivial investment in interaction design and testing upstream could have helped avoid costly consequences downstream.

Why does healthcare product design lag?

The simple answer is because the design discipline usually isn’t invited to the table. In most cases only engineering and marketing contribute to a product’s design—whether that product is hardware, software, or services. The problem is that engineering concerns itself primarily with feasibility and marketing with viability. This excludes the role human experience plays in the success or failure of products, resulting in so many poorly designed healthcare applications and devices.

Contrary to popular misconceptions design is not about style or aesthetics. Design is about people, real people. Design is about understanding and solving real problems real people experience. It seeks to deliver solutions that are the most useful, usable and desirable. Integrating design with engineering and marketing yields a more balanced, holistic and effective model for creating great products.

However this is a relatively new model, and as many of us know, healthcare can be very slow to adopt new models.

Why do you need a new model when the old ones have been working so well?

Poor design is not a competitive disadvantage in an environment where it is the norm. It is however a huge disadvantage when both markets start rejecting poor design and new players start delivering good design. Where competitors quickly match functionality, and solid quality initiatives have improved reliability across the board, good human-centered design is the next battleground for competitive advantage.

For instance, both Philips and GE have deep competencies in design for consumer markets where human experience is often the prime differentiator. They are now beginning to leverage these competencies for their healthcare efforts to boldly drive preference for their products and brand among patients, clinicians and administrators.

The consequences of poor design include delivering products that may exceed quality expectations, but that miss what people truly need, that are hard to learn, that are hard to use, that propose less compelling market choices for both clinicians and administrators, that increase patient safety risks and that ultimately damage your company’s brand.

So what can you do to help deliver better design?

Simply make design part of how you do things. Focus on people rather than technology. Judge your design ideas on how useful, usable and desirable they are. Open up your culture to appropriate change by introducing your people to design thinking and methods through training. Use personas and scenarios to help keep you focused on people. Foster in-house design talent. Cultivate a trust relationship with a quality design firm who can not only deliver but also educate. And most importantly for many in healthcare, give design some teeth by making design targets part of your quality system. Think big, but start small.

Some companies staff clinicians to help design products. This is a fantastic idea. But it is no substitute for an explicit competency in design. Users are not designers and more often than not don’t understand their own needs. Just like patients, users are only partially aware of symptoms and not root causes. They cannot therefore provide a diagnosis or a treatment on their own. Henry Ford famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”