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The “Vision” Thing

Predictably, the tech press and blogs (I’ll just file them under “pundits”) followed up the official announcement by nearly unanimously criticizing the iPad as a complete and utter disappointment.  Granted, the expectations that this device was held up to were ones that no product could ever hope to satisfy.  However, it’s not as simple as that.  The punditry and typical commenters on sites such as C|Net and TechCrunch exhibited a severe lack of technological vision.  It was like watching the Windows crowd (I was one of them at the time) getting all wrapped around the axle and hysterical when Apple released their original iMacs without legacy ports and ditching the floppy altogether.

I’m not saying that the silliness is going unanswered.  For a thoughtful commentary, check out Sam Kington’s piece.

An Analogy

One of the loudest complaints about the iPad (and iPhone) is that it doesn’t support Flash.  I was told by someone last Thursday that he wouldn’t buy it because it doesn’t have Flash.  Well, to be honest, he wouldn’t buy it because it’s from Apple.  Anyway, what a lot of people don’t understand is that on OS X, Flash is garbage.  If OS X or Safari crashes, you can easily bet your lunch money that the cause was Flash.  Apple even called out Adobe on this issue when they were demoing Snow Leopard and Safari 4’s plugin-level sandboxing.  They were saying, “Adobe, we all know Flash is a steaming pile and this is what we’re doing to protect our customers.”  A rogue Flash plugin would suck the iPhone (or iPad) battery dry in no time at all and crashes at the hands of Flash would wreck the user experience, leading to greater frustrations and customer revolts than they would have from not supporting Flash at all.

Since the release of the iPhone, Apple has been supporting the use of open standards in place of Flash.  With greater effort nowadays being put into the development of HTML 5 and CSS 3, these standards are being given the blessing as the purest way to code for the web.  The pundits and many in the IT world either don’t know about the issues of OS X and Flash or they don’t care.  They don’t get it because they’re so far removed from the world of the average consumer.  When told that HTML 5 is the way to go moving forward (especially for video), all they give you are blank stares followed with “but ‘everything’s’ in Flash!”  The problem is, they don’t get the obvious analogy.

Flash is to the iPhone/iPad as the legacy ports were to the original iMac

In both cases, IT “pros” complained loudly that the dated and obsolete technology they’ve attached themselves to was given the executioner’s axe by Apple.  Apple was the first manufacturer to ditch the legacy serial ports (they never supported parallel ports in Macs) for USB and they were the first to ditch the floppy.

When the HTML 5 spec is completed, Flash itself will no longer have any reason to exist as it does now. With AJAX, there’s no need to require a plugin to deliver interactivity.  With H.264 and the <video> tag, there’s no need to require Flash for true cross-platform video support.  I’m sure I’ll catch heat from Firefox fans (Firefox does not support H.264, but rather Theora), so here’s my reasoning:

1. Of the participants in the development of the HTML standards, the Mozilla Foundation is joined by Apple and Google, among others.  Microsoft just recently decided to start participating in the development of HTML 5.  More on them in a bit.
2. Apple and Google both use WebKit, an open source project managed by Apple.  WebKit supports only H.264 with the <video> tag. Neither Apple, nor Google are doing anything to drop it by any means.
3. Google reencoded all of the YouTube videos to H.264.
4. H.264 is increasingly accepted as the standard of choice for mobile devices, spearheaded by Apple’s iPhone.
5. YouTube and Vimeo, perhaps the two largest sources of user-created videos are now offering beta versions of their sites where H.264 video is provided without Flash.
6. Though Microsoft owns VC-1, adoption has been scant, save for the few uses of Silverlight.
7. Microsoft owns H.264-related patents and thus has stake in its success.
8. Though Theora isn’t bad, per se, H.264 is more efficient.

The future of video does not look favorable for Flash, especially when there’ll be a choice between playback in the browser without a resource-hogging plugin and said plugin.  For interactivity, it would be smart of Adobe to start positioning the product as a development tool of interactivity using HTML 5, CSS 3, and SVG.  If they don’t somebody else will.

This is a stance that Apple is not budging from.  Take the intra-Apple town hall meeting where Jobs said of Adobe, effectively:

They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.

Source

Also note the time (13:04) in the demo when Steve Jobs visited the New York Times web site and had a “missing plugin” icon where a Flash movie was supposed to be was no accident.  This was quintessential Jobs.  He was sending a message to Adobe.  ”Your steaming pile (Flash) isn’t going to be allowed on this device.”  The usual pundits and IT “pros” thought this was a funny gaffe exposing a fundamental flaw in the device.  They apparently haven’t bothered to understand how Jobs works.  Let’s take for example the announcement of the publishers that Apple partnered with in bringing the written word to the device.  Jobs listed 5 major publishers.  However, the one publisher (McGraw Hill) whose CEO announced on MSNBC the night before the reveal that they were working with Apple on the iPad was missing from that slide.  This was no accident.

It’s Not Just A Bigger iPod Touch

Those who are claiming the iPad is nothing more than an oversized iPod Touch are just exposing themselves as unimaginative.  How so?  Well, let’s look at one announcement that commanded a good deal of time in the event: iWork.  The Microsoft-devotees predictably laughed-off this portion of the event because they will not, under any circumstances, give iWork the amount of credit it deserves.  It’s not Office, you know.  However, what these “professionals” missed was the underlying message:  Not only can you upsize iPhone apps for the iPad, you can write full-featured applications originally found only on the desktop for the iPad.  In fact, I look forward to Bento for the iPad.  Not only is iWork for the iPad a (seemingly) fully functional full-featured application, but it’s a technology demonstrator for those other development shops, large and small.  Those developers and/or companies that realized this first will reap the earliest benefits.  The pundits will be left scratching their heads, asking, “whoa, how did that happen?” when it comes to pass.

One common complaint, especially among the Windows fanbois was that they were disappointed that this device used the iPhone OS instead of the full version of OS X.  A couple points here:

1. iPhone OS is OS X
2. The desktop OS is designed around precision pointing devices, not fingers

That second point is worth repeating.  Desktop versions of OS X and Windows are not designed for use with fingers.  Sure, Windows 7 has multitouch baked in.  However, as was seen when Steve Ballmer fumbled with HP’s Slate, he had a difficult time using the smaller UI elements in Windows 7 with his finger.  This is the reason why Apple went with the iPhone OS.  You get the ability to write full-featured applications with a UI designed from the ground-up for use with fingers.

eBook Poseurs?

One all-to-common comment from the iPad-haters is that the iPad is not a “real” ebook device.  Those who would read books on the iPad are just poseurs and wannabes.  For books that are only text, I’m quite sure the Kindle is just fine and probably handles the task with aplomb.  However, many of the books I read and have read include color illustrations:  Edward Tufte’s books, Garr Reynolds’ books, and Nancy Duarte’s book come to mind immediately.  This is a task that the Kindle fails at miserably because eInk does not support color.  The developers of eInk are working on color, but so far, the quality is nowhere near where you would want it to be to view movies or play games, tasks that apple’s iPhone OS handles quite well.

What these wannabe elitists need to realize that their specific use case isn’t the one and only true and pure use case.  In fact, to truly determine the worthiness of the iPad, you need to look at how this device could fit into your lifestyle, assuming it does at all.  For my wife and myself, it’s a perfect fit.  I get a color eBook reader that gives me the more powerful computing capabilities that only a more powerful device with a screen larger than the iPhone’s can give me.  Netbooks lack the form factor that would ever be of any use to me.

If you have an image management application such as Lightroom, Aperture, or iPhoto, you could use it.  They have decent metadata support, but you’d be mixing all of these random images with your own library.

Since I already have a license for Bento, I thought I’d give that a try.  For those who don’t know what Bento is, it’s the smaller, lighter, and easier to use sibling of FileMaker, a powerful and cross-platform desktop and server-based database.  Though FileMaker is cross-platform, Bento is Mac only.  Bento lets you create new databases, called libraries, easily and with a completely visual interface.  No programming or understanding of databases or how they work is needed.

Now, even if I didn’t have to worry about mixing my personal photography with these images I use for my slides, I wouldn’t use iPhoto or the like because of the information I want to track with the images.  I want to be able to track and search by the image type and/or keywords and I want to be able to track the licensing information so I know what I can and can’t do legally with the images.

The template that I created (the download link at the end of this post) includes the following fields:

• Source
• Background (color)
• Type
• Keywords
• License
• Credit (person or site)
• Source URL
• Attribution

That last field is a calculated field, meaning it takes the license, credit, and URL fields and creates a string of text for attribution that you can use in your slides when attribution is required.

Image Assets Betno Template (download) by Mike Pulsifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

via techcrunch.com

Hopefully, this is the opening salvo in what will mean the end of plug-in driven sites using Flash and Silverlight. Flash leaks memory like a colander and Silverlight is just another means for Microsoft to try to turn the web into its own proprietary playground.

ENOUGH!!!

I signed up for the beta and I hope you will to. Mark your vote for open standards and being forced to install plugins to view content (especially government-created content, the ultimate slap in the face, kick in the groin, punch in the gut insult to taxpayers).

Posted via web from Mike Pulsifer’s posterous

Posted via web from Mike Pulsifer’s posterous

Posted via web from Mike Pulsifer’s posterous

Nambu’s iPhone app can post to Twitter, Identi.ca, and Ping.fm (great for when I want to update my LinkedIn status). However, I can’t post to just Twitter and Identi.ca in the app. With that one change, I’d use Nambu far more often. Add to it Tweetie’s depth of funcionality, and I’ll switch completely.

Nambu:

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Mike Pulsifer’s posterous

United States

After looking at USA’s Drupal powered Whitehouse website, their actual government website is a huge letdown, it uses dated HTML and awful header graphics.

Having seen the gallery of government web sites from around the world (link above), I must agree. The offerings from the United States are pretty poor. My impression from working in this sewer of intellectualism and integrity called Washington, DC for 13 years is that I seriously doubt ANY of the government web shops are out there looking at what other governments are doing well in designing their sites.

Take for example Poland’s site:

Compare that to USA.gov (or any of the other federal web sites out there) and ask yourself, which is inviting me to explore and learn more? USA.gov to me seems a lot like using the Dell web site to buy a laptop (Dell….*shudder*). Too many choices. At least they don’t have that side-scrolling list anymore, but even so, it’s still makes choosing the one that you want and is right for you daunting.

Poland’s design for http://www.poland.gov.pl doesn’t overwhelm you with choices. Granted, I can’t read the language, but the secondary pages seem equally well organized. There’s even a very well done integration of video near the top of the page.

In short, sites like USA.gov and damn well pretty much the rest of the federal government (US) have a design philosophy that is very much mechanical and bureaucratic. Sites like the Polish example above follow a philosophy that is very much human and aims to provide a positive user experience.

Posted via web from Mike Pulsifer’s posterous

The danger inherent in protecting the status quo over the new and creative is that truly innovative solutions and, in keeping with the theme of this site, engaging presentation visuals fail to see the light of day.  Creativity is essential for the success of any individual or organization, public or private.

This article will address three barriers to truly embracing and fostering creativity:  organizational narcissism, the biology of risk aversion, and misplaced perceptions of value.  I’ll follow this up with some ideas of how to stop the madness.

Organizational Narcissism

Creativity comes in many forms, that much is true.  With that said, there is a great deal of “organizational narcissism” at play that fosters a sense among many that will have you hearing claims that the agencies and offices are just as creative as Madison Avenue, even though they haven’t created anything truly original.

Organizational narcissism is just what it appears to be:  the Narcissistic Personality Disorder on a collective scale.  To better understand this, let’s look at the elements of this affliction:

• There is a grandiose sense of self-importance.
• An inflated judgment of one’s own accomplishments.
• The individual assumes that others are totally concerned about his welfare.
• Though overweening ambition and confidence may lead to high achievement, performance may be disrupted due to intolerance of criticism or defeat.

source: http://www.centerod.com/organizational-narcissism.html

Applying these criteria to federal agencies is like shooting fish in a barrel.  Take the first criterion, for example.  Ask employees of any federal agency whether they think civilized society in America will grind to a halt if they closed up shop, and you’ll surely get more than one answer in the affirmative, especially the higher you go.  Of course, none of the agencies are so important that our country couldn’t adapt and adjust to the disappearance of any of them.

The second criterion gets to the heart of my example of repackaging what’s already been done, verbatim, and calling it “innovation.”  Due to the importance of the status quo to organizations such as these, these solutions are innovative only if you exclude the real world and what has been accomplished there.  Of course, this happens because narcissistic organizations are overly focused inwardly on themselves.

The third criterion is one that I believe appears in an organization in a more subtle fashion than the others.  You see it when agencies and their employees expect that other agencies or even the public will gladly seek their council, pay for services, or take the time to learn all about them.  You see it when acronyms (there’s no shortage of those) are thrown about with the assumption that others know what they mean.  You see it when the public is expected to know the organizational structure of a department.  You see it when a support organization expects that the other organizations they expect to support will gladly cut their budgets and off-load the work they had always been responsible for.  You see it when involuntary constituents are called “customers” as though those individuals freely chose to use that agency’s “services” over someone else.

The fourth criterion of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder applied to organizations is where you see the impact on individual creativity.   Intolerance of criticism or defeat is the key ingredient for enforcing the status quo.  Many of us have heard it before.  “Don’t rock the boat.”  “Don’t mess up a good thing [we’ve got going here].”  “Don’t try to change the world.”  “That’s not the way it’s done around here.”  The problem is, if you don’t rock the boat, it’ll never move.  I can’t claim credit for that statement, but I can’t remember where I read it.  It was either in one of the many books I read or perhaps from a fortune cookie.  Either way, it’s a very important message.

This element can manifest itself in different ways, but perhaps the most common in IT shops is through entrenched attitudes and technology allegiances.  In my years in IT, I’ve learned the dangers of the curse of the certifications, especially the MCP and MCSE.  This isn’t a dig at Microsoft per se, but rather at the business of certifications and the overly inflated importance the industry (especially the government) has placed on them.  The process of obtaining and maintaining these certifications often requires a significant investment of time and money.  So much so, that the breadth of products and vendors for which certification is obtained is more often than not limited to one and a small handful of complementary (as opposed to competing) technologies and companies.  Microsoft and the others knew this would happen when they established these certification exams and classes.  Thus, what we get out of this is a technological myopia and a sense (wrongly) that using a technology or product outside of or in competition with the one aligned with their certification is a threat to their job security and thus their livelihood.

It is this IT myopia that makes it difficult for open source operating systems and software to make more inroads than it already has.  It’s also manifested in open hostility to allowing a few Macs into the environment to perform specific tasks that they excel at or even to broaden exposure to different technologies in the IT shop.  In my opinion, a true IT professional can function comfortably in at least two different operating systems.  Any less is entry level.

This is where I tie this all back to creativity.  Creativity involves taking novel ideas or approaches to solve problems, no matter how trivial or complex they are.  Exposure to and understanding different avenues of thought, methods, and technologies open the mind to different, even radically different ideas.

The Biology of Risk Aversion

Creativity, by its very nature involves taking risks.  As Joseph Chilton Pearce said, “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”  Unfortunately, this fear of being wrong and the implications of this, be it embarrassment, rejection, or worse, holds dominion over much of our professional lives.  It is likely the biggest obstacle to overcome in the presentation slide design process and it is often what injects itself into projects.

The Project Management Body of Knowledge defines risk as “an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on a project’s objectives.  Risk has a cause and, if it occurs, a consequence.  Project risk includes both threats to the project’s objectives and opportunities to those objectives.”  In a nutshell, anything you think, say, or do can have unintended consequences, good or bad.

If project managers and those in IT share anything in common, it’s the lust for the orderly and predictable.  Creativity is, by its nature, anything but orderly or predictable.  Taking this a step further, Pablo Picasso said, “every act of creation is also an act of destruction.”  To be creative, you need to tear down the old and build something (even ideas) new, whose outcome is uncertain.  All to often, the fear of this uncertainty leads project managers and the time-crunched IT workers to warp the idea of risk management.  What tends to happen is an effort is made to minimize the risks rather than manage them.

If the PMI definition of risk management were implemented for Apollo 11, then we still would have landed on the moon.  There’d be reams and reams of documents written that nobody would ever read, but we’d get there.  How it’s often implemented, however, would have us still in the design phase of the project some forty years later.  There’s no way one of the risk-minimizers would let you strap three people to a giant rocket that costs millions of dollars, propelled by highly explosive rocket fuel and launch them off of this planet and into orbit around the moon finally landing two them on the surface where one boulder, unaccounted for, could cause catastrophic damage.

Why, then, do we have these risk-minimizers who fear creativity?  Why do some of us fear going out on a limb and buck convention when we design our PowerPoint slides?

In large part, it’s biological.  Two books you should, without question, read are Iconoclast, by Gregory Berns and Brain Rules, by Dr. John Medina.  Together, these books will help you understand why people (including and especially yourself) think the way they do, the barriers to creative thought, and how we can allow ourselves to grow.

The Amygdala In the Brain (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constudoverbrain.png)

In short, the amygdala is to blame.  Correction:  the inability for one to override the amygdala is to blame.

The amygdala is the region of our brain that processes and prepares for and stores our emotional reactions.  If you learn to question and even override your amygdala when necessary, it can be very useful as a risk management organ, alerting you of dangers and triggering the necessary emotional response to move you to respond appropriately.  Unchecked, however, it can dominate your responses to new or different ideas.

Take for example, someone, let’s call him John Smith, who’s only used Windows sitting down in front of a Mac.  Based on John’s sensory input, his amygdala tells him this is different and he has an uncertain feeling about his ability to use the computer.  Unchecked, his amygdala can trigger a fear response whereby he gives up and/or starts reading off fifteen year old myths to those around him as reasons why this machine in front of him is worthy only of rejection.  However, if kept in check, John can override the fear response and instead learn and try to understand this different way of doing things, writing new memories and associating new emotional responses to this type of stimuli.  This is what separates those stuck in the OS-wars of yesteryear from those willing to get beyond the old arguments and get on with computing.  It’s what separates those who are afraid of creativity or are afraid to be creative from those who are willing to be creative.

Misplaced Perceptions of Value

If there’s one thing we can all agree to disagree on, it’s what the value of an idea, technology, or presentation visual is.  In IT, there is much agreement on how to assign value to an idea or product, yet they’re incredibly out of touch with the users.  This is greatly evident in the federal government where a cost-benefit analysis more often than not seems to address the former and not the latter.

Technical folks, in my experience, see value as a numbers game.  For example, if solutions A and B both meet the minimum requirements and A costs $10,000 and B costs $20,000, the response from most in the field would be that A is a better value.  In addition, they most often see a slide crammed with a couple paragraphs or a dozen wordy bullets as a better value than a slide emphasizing one point visually.

What is often ignored is how the end-user, the public, or customer (in the case of private industry) perceives value.  Judging by how consumers are buying up Macs at a rate well above the other brands, those outside IT clearly don’t see value as a binary numbers game.  They place value in those other intangibles such as ease of use, security, less required maintenance, and yes, design.

In Summary…

It is these three impediments to creativity that are why you don’t ground-breaking web-based interfaces coming out of the government.  It’s why, in my opinion, why so many cling to bullets and openly resist attempts to introduce a new way of presenting information.  You’re attempting to mess up the “good” thing they’ve got going.  You’re introducing uncertainty, and therefore risk.  Good design can’t (easily) be quantified.

So, what can we do about this?  Let’s look at the ways we can address these issues and rather than inhibit creativity, let’s see how we can foster it:

Dealing With Organizational Narcissism

• Refocus on what’s real.  Try to move the group’s focus away from grandiose fantasies and refocus it on reality.  When the conversations start swirling around how great the organization is, change the subject to what the organization should be doing.
• Think outwardly.  The organization’s leadership should be setting the collective sight outside of the organization itself.  Goals should be set for how you can make life better for your constituencies, customers, or audience rather than how good you think this will make you organization look or how powerful it may become.
• Mission first, everything else last.  If you work in a web shop, what’s your mission?  Is it to build web sites and applications that support your agency/company or is it to build web sites and applications that support your constituents/customers?  Are your presentation slides being used as notes or a “record” of what’s discussed (internal focus) or are they being used to help with comprehension and retention of your message (external focus)?
• Expose yourself and your organization to new and different ideas, tools, and ways to do things.  Change organizational perception of the new and different from one of fear and loathing to hope and opportunity.

Dealing With Risk Aversion

• Embrace risk.  Nobody ever got anywhere playing it safe all of the time.  Progress is made when someone goes out on a limb with either an new idea, product, process, or design.  What looks like an invitation for disaster may turn out to be the key to success.  As Mark Twain said, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life.  A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
• Be willing to accept and own up to failure.  In science and in life, far more is learned from mistakes and failures than is ever learned from doing it right the first time.  The former forces you to try new things and different approaches while the latter fosters tunnel vision.  Owning up to failure can also lead to taking ownership of success.  Passing the buck will surely lead to passing the baton.  To quote Marshall Cook, “Creative people must entertain lots of silly ideas in order to receive the occasional strokes of genius.”
• Force yourself to experience and learn new things.  Do you work in IT?  Do you only know Windows?  Take a class in or teach yourself how to use Linux or the Mac.  Are you a designer?  Expose yourself to different disciplines and artists that have a different perspective.  Do you deliver presentations?  Expose yourself to different presentation styles and try them yourself.  Force yourself to broaden your perspective.
• Get out.  Get away.  Meet off-site occasionally to force yourself into a different environment.  If you regularly meet off-site, change up the locations.  Thrusting yourself into new and unfamiliar territory tricks your brain to process your thoughts and external stimuli, cutting-off the emotional shortcuts your brain typically takes.

Reevaluate Value

• Remember who you’re serving.  That web site you’re building isn’t for use by your organization nearly as much as it is for the site’s constituency/customers.  That presentation you’re giving isn’t for your benefit nearly as much as it is for your audience.
• The user/audience experience matters just as much as the requirements.  The functionality may be there, but if the users can’t find it or your audience doesn’t comprehend or retain it, then the whole effort was a waste.
• It’s not a purely numbers game.  A confusing interface that meets 100% of the technical requirements yet costs half as much as an easy to use interface that meets 95% of the requirements is arguably not a better value.  Slides that distract, yet hold all the information you’re sharing are by far a worse value than slides that reinforce the spoken message clearly and efficiently.
• Employ the Golden Rule.  Put yourself in your your constituent’s/customer’s/audience’s shoes.  Ask yourself how you, as a regular person, would want to be treated.

Here are the photos I took during and (mostly) after the “blizzard” of ‘09 from Martinsburg, WV.

Posted via web from Mike Pulsifer’s posterous