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Webvisions – Notes from Bill Scott’s Anti-Patterns that Stifle Lean UX Teams

What is Lean Startup?

  • Comes from the Lean Startup movement; it’s about build, measure, learn
  • GOOB – Get out of the Building
  • Invalidate Your Risky Assumptions
  • Go for the Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
  • Fail fast, learn fast
  • Get to the pivot

What is Lean UX?

  • Designing products for build, measure, learn (lean startup)
  • Requires 3 rules to be followed at all times
  • Get to and maintain a Shared Understanding
  • The more understanding, the less documentation
  • Deep Collaboration
  • Strong belief that ideas come from many different voices
  • Trust is essential
  • All efforts never stray far from collaborative efforts
  • Continuous Customer Feedback
  • This is the lifeblood of the team
  • Gets rid of politics
  • Turns a team outside-in

Good Patterns

  • Continuous Customer Feedback – Get out of the Building (GOOB)
  • Customer metrics drive everything
  • Think it. Build it. Ship it. Tweak it.
  • Fail Fast. Learn Fast
  • Lots of experimentation…
  • Build, Measure, Learn
  • Launching PS3 for Netflix
  • 16 different test cells
  • 2 different tech blogs were simultaneously reviewing different experiences
  • Focus was on build, measure, learn
  • HTML5 drive them to learn fast with their customers–they used HTML5 to make that possible.
  • The one that they thought would win ended up not being the one that was chosen by users

And now, Bill goes to PayPal…

  • Paypal had a roll your own culture
  • Disconnected delivery–deliver but get no data/feedback
  • Long Shelf life–takes for ever to get things out the door
  • Product managers rush to cram their features out the door because of the release cycles
  • Lots of cramming, lots of featuritis
  • Culture of a long shelf life and inward focusing; very risk averse
  • New DNA at PayPal

January 2012

  • Fleshed out UI layer that could support rapid experimentation

March 2012

  • David Marcus becomes president of PayPal
  • Hermes Project
  • Used a variant of Lean UX; doesn’t have to be religious
  • Agile running at the same time

Before Lean UX/After Lean UX

  • Bill shows screen shots that show some pretty significant differences. Things got simpler

The Anti-Patterns

  • “Some feelings got hurt by designers who create things that look like Picasso and then they sort of get dumped on my developers”

Genius Designer

  • All design emanates from an Huber Designer. Team doesn’t collaboratively participate in design/ideation
  • Solution: Keep the inspiration of genius designer but bring in others to brainstorm. Focus on MVP to test with customers immediately; critical to build team success early.
  • Everyone is a genius designer; without customer feedback you’re just getting a lot of arguing–get to the customers and get stuff resolved.

Tribal Groups

  • When a team is very small, members are forced to work across disciplines. As soon as team gets bigger, tribes reform around skills. Collaboration stops.
  • Solution: keep team reasonably small. leaders in each discipline must form a tribe that works across disciplines; keep collaboration high.

Stranger

  • Lean teams will form shared understanding, however when a new “stranger” joins, we assume this hard earned understanding will just happen.
  • Solution: The team must immediately stop and initiate the newcomer. Be patient, answer questions, reset vocabulary and enjoy the new voice in the team. Get back to regular cadence.

Bad Habits

  • Teams will often make a good start by trying out new behaviors and seemingly leave old behaviors behind. Beware! Old habits will creep back in.
  • Solution: You must do it long enough and be successful long enough to ensure team members internalize the new habits. Build in checks and balances that enforce new habits.

Naysayer

  • With collaboration so important, it is key to believe in the process to create great products. A single naysayer can bring the team down in an instant.
  • Solution:  The naysayer must either learn new techniques or leave the team. Often they have valid concerns; channel that energy convergence time not divergent thinking.
  • Can’t be tolerated; get rid of the negative energy asap.

Visitor

  • Input from outside the team is essential, however, watch out. People cycling in and out of the team can cause the same disruption that the stranger anti-pattern causes. Also know as Seagull: swoop and poop, HIPPO, etc.
  • Solution: customer trumps visitor. Take input, test early and often with customers. That is the only “visitor” that ultimately matters.

Magic Tool

  • Design and prototyping tools can accelerate ideation and design, however, be careful. Tools that empower prototyping can enable designers to work in isolation
  • Solution: Use tools as means to collaborate. Never revert to “deliver” model of design. Sketching is a real key to encouraging collaboration. Also “design in the wild” approach.
  • Might be better to encourage sketching, learning HTML5 for prototyping, and even using storyboarding to walk people through the story of what’s happening.

Going Dark

  • When a developer, product manager, or designer goes dark for more than a day (or two) the team is losing valuable collaboration.
  • Solution: Working in isolation is necessary from time to time. However, limit to short periods of time. Make work continuously visible, balance individual productivity with group creativity.

Change of Cadence

  • Change of cadence is actually a good and normal happening, however, whenever the rhythm changes, it can bring productivity down.
  • Solution: prepare the team for the change and quickly get focus and re-establish with new cadence.

Too Many Cooks

  • The work needs to be divided up among different types of cooks (Chef de cuisine, Sous-chef, Chef de partie, etc.)
  • Solution: Have clear decision makers in each discipline and have specific roles (you can also rotate these functions).

Not Enough Pizza

  • When a team suddenly scales up in size, the team is in danger of losing cadence
  • Solution:

Tower of Babel

  • Shared understand is key to lean UX. However, it is easy to assume too quickly that team members are speaking the same language.
  • Solution: Always ask “what do you mean by X?” Always ensure other disciplines understand your jargon. Spend time with customers together. Get a shared language.

You’ve Got Mail

  • Teams can revert to email over collaboration. Also geographically distributed teams can fall into delivery by email vs. Collaboration.
  • Solution: Utilize high bandwidth communication (face to face, hangouts, telepresence, magic whiteboards, etc.)

Inmates Running the Asylum

  • This is from Alan Coopers book of the same name. When engineers drive design the inmates are running the asylum
  • Solution: Front end engineers must partner with product/design

Perfectionist

  • Not embracing the challenge of the unknown, the perfectionist will not share their work tip it is perfect. Easy for designers to fall into this trap.
  • Solution:  Share early, often, and incomplete. Feedback and appropriate critique is key.

The Wall

  • Walls between teams can happen when we allow tribes to form, we see other teams as delivery factories, etc.

Tangled Up Technology

  • Unless the technology stack is built to have a clear separation from experience and services, the lean team cannot make rapid progress. Watch out when dev teams care too much about the specific version of the UI
  • Solution:  key patterns include building services and CLIs, etc.

 

Feedback & Learning from Mobile Camp Chicago 2013

On April 20th at the Harrington College of Design in Chicago, we held our first Mobile Camp. We learned a lot, and had a lot of fun–and we’re pretty grateful that we get to do this type of event with and for people in Chicago, which is a great city with a pretty incredible tech scene that we love. We asked for some feedback, and we’ve heard some really great things.

I’m going to go through some of the feedback and hopefully provide some insight and/or some ideas about what we think we may do differently in the future!

The things that people loved, they really loved.

This seems a bit obvious, but it was good to hear that people enjoyed the keynotes and that a few speakers really did draw some high praise. We’re sharing this feedback with them and encouraging them to continue to speak–both at Chicago Camps and other events. This is part of why we do the events and it really is awesome to be able to see these things happen!

People really enjoyed the give-aways that we were able to provide through our excellent sponsors. We have shared that with them, as well. I don’t generally think that I’ve done the best job in the world at post-conference communication, so I’ve really tried to focus on that this time. Brad pulled together a really nice infographic-esque PDF that we sent to all of the sponsors to break down what the day was like, and it was great to hear from them that this was appreciated–and in some cases, pretty rare. We’re going to keep doing that, and keep trying to get better at it. We’re really grateful that we’re able to structure sponsorships in such a way that we can bring great things–video seminars, software licenses, books, books, and more books, breakfast, and even some water and snacks. We really try hard to make sure that we can provide your money’s worth for your ticket price, and we want to keep making that happen. If you know someone who is interested in sponsoring one of our upcoming camps, we’d love to hear from them! :-)

We also put one of these infographics together for everyone else, too. Brad did a great job pulling this stuff together and it’s on the Mobile Camp website to check out. And I’m putting it here, too:

Mobile Camp Chicago 2013 By The Numbers

The venue, well, some folks wish it was bigger.

I’m being very sincere when I say that we–and Harrington College of Design–wish the space was a little bit bigger, too! That said, Harrington is an amazing sponsor, and their sponsorship allows us to keep the ticket price at $50 without incurring a lot of risk on our part. They’re generous with us, and they’re great partners for experimenting–without them, there’s no way we would have been able to experiment (on a whim, and on the fly) with the Remote Track we had at Mobile Camp. They happily jumped right in and worked with us to allow us to line up top-notch talent in Christian Crumlish, Greg Nudelman, and Jason Cranford Teague, who were able to present from the comfort of their own location. The feedback that we hears is that this was pretty great, and people really enjoyed those talks.

We learned a lot from this, too, and there are more ideas we’re tinkering with because of it. We know there were some mistakes and challenges, so we’re going to see about doing even more cool things with that option.

We also learned from Prototype Camp 2012 that if we have anything more than 100 people, it gets pretty tight in our space, so we knowingly restrict ourselves to 100 people. At Prototype Camp, a lot of people couldn’t get into the room to see Jared Spool’s keynote and that was a miserable start to the day for me. I felt horrible, and I’d rather endure some of the upset emails about the lack of tickets than have someone miss out on part of the content. This time around, Harrington turned on a couple of projectors in their social space, and pushed the audio out there as well–you didn’t have to sit in the “main” room to enjoy the talks. It was just them tinkering around to help us out, and it was pretty cool.

Some people pointed out that we didn’t always have enough chairs in the classrooms–and we absolutely agree! We’re working with Harrington on that, too. This is also one of the reasons why we used some different rooms this time around compared to Prototype Camp, and this is part of the reason that we offer 3 rooms of talks. We want to try and prevent people from getting too crowded, and we’ll have to see how we can be a little better at trying to figure out which topics may be stronger than some of the others and try to place them in rooms accordingly. Sometimes, that feels like throwing darts, but I suspect we’ll get better at that over time.

5 minutes between sessions wasn’t enough.

No doubt. We learned that one the hard way, especially in the Remote track. We’re going to work through some of the scheduling to try and be more accommodating for future camps.

Better definition of the tracks would be useful.

This was a tough one, for me. There are a lot of things to balance when planning a schedule–from the topic balance (too much Responsive Design was a BIG concern), to topic level (beginner, intermediate, advanced), to finding the right people who are in Chicago and who have content to share, well, it gets challenging. And that is a pretty lousy excuse–we, and by we, I mean me, really need to step that up in the future, and we’re going to focus on making sure we can be more clear either in the way the tracks shape up, or how we define them. The feedback was a great reminder to renew that focus.

Some thought that a sponsored lunch would have been better than a sponsored breakfast.

We’re grateful for all of our sponsors, and this time around we simply were not able to identify a lunch sponsor to help us with that. SapientNitro not only graciously provided a generous spread, but they also gave away an iPad Mini, and we think that is a pretty fantastic sponsorship! We do realize that the Loop in Chicago gets a little empty on the weekends, and we’re fortunate enough to already have a lunch sponsor for Prototype Camp in August.

We’re all ears if there are ideas about other companies who are interested in sponsoring our meals or other aspects of the events–we’ll be revisiting our sponsorship options moving forward. Please share some additional ideas for sponsorships with us!

There were a lot of really great speakers. Some really shined brightly.

We worked with some speakers to be a sounding board for their abstracts and ideas, and we offered ourselves up for reviewing content prior to Mobile Camp. Timing didn’t always play to our favor, and some speakers have their own approach. We’re going to be a bit more proactive in the future about checking in with speakers and seeing if there is more we can do to be available to them. We’ve all got full time jobs, so this doesn’t always pan out, but there is likely more that we can do to be better stewards to our speakers and the attendees.

And! We’d also love to have more of you submit your ideas to us. We’re always going to seek out first-time presenters and help them get on stage. This type of venue is perfect for that, and our attendees are pretty over-the-top great when it comes to being supportive. If you’ve got an idea, please send it along to us so we can help you get up on stage!

Some thought it was well worth the value–and more! Others thought maybe we could have done better.

We agree! We really are proud of the value we provide, and it’s great to be able to supplement the content with nice things like complimentary water, snacks, breakfast, the give-aways, and the delicious beer, but none of those things are a replacement for quality content.

We’re going to focus on the value that we get through sponsors, but also focus on making sure we’re keeping our eyes on how the talks and the schedule balance out. We know it’s tricky, but hey, we signed up to do this thing, and we can always improve. And we want to always improve.

It was suggested that we could take and post notes, including many of the different tools, tips, etc. that were shared.

This is probably more than we can handle given our small size (3 people, not including a small band of volunteers). We can, however, do a better job of asking our speakers to post their slides to SlideShare or some other slide-sharing website so that attendees can find them. We know it would be nice if we could post notes, but we also know a lot of people attend so that they can do things like sketchnote and blog about the events later. We also would hate to miss out on notes that attendees might think are important but we overlooked–and outsourcing your own note taking seems slightly akin to outsourcing your vacation, minus all the vacation-y stuff.

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That’s a lot to contend with–and we know we’ve got our work cut out for us. We hope you’ll continue to come hang out with us at our camps, and we hope to see you at Speaker Camp on June 22nd!

Mobile Camp Chicago 2013 – Lessons from the Remote Track

A Little Background:

Mobile Camp Chicago 2013On April 20th at the Harrington College of Design in Chicago, we held our first Mobile Camp. Overall, I’m thinking it was pretty successful and I’m sure that having a couple of custom beers from Jawhole/Stephen Strong didn’t really hurt the situation at all, followed by an incredible closing keynote from Samantha Starmer. Samantha showed the attendees what an excellent storyteller looks like, only better!

One of the nice things about Harrington and these inexpensive “camps” (we know “camps” is a white lie; they’re single day conferences but we keep them intentionally budget-conscious so people don’t have to sweat paying for it themselves) is that we have agreed that we’re going to experiment and stretch every time that we do them. This time, we tried pushing the audio and video of the “main” room into the social space of our floor and it was pretty cool–it has us thinking about how to improve this experience overall, and maybe do more with it so that we can lift our 100-person cap on the event, so long as it doesn’t compromise the experience for people spending their hard-earned money on us.

We also really try to promote new and new-ish presenters and help them get on stage in a pretty safe environment for a first (or new) presentation. For $50, we kind of think people will be forgiving of any gaffes on either our part or the part of presenters, and so far that’s panning out nicely.

And to the point of this post, we get to try something new, like having remote presentations. I belong to the Rosenfeld Media Consulting & Training Troupe (that “troupe” bit is a joke; but what an amazing group of super-talented professionals that I get to hang out with–if you have an opportunity to work with Rosenfeld Media, you should!) and there are a lot of smart folks there with a lot of really honed presentation skills. I threw out a nibble suggesting that we had the capability to try a few new things, including remote presenters, and it turns out that a few people thought they’d like to try and to this. We all agreed that this could suck, and that there was a risk it just wouldn’t work, and the great thing about admitting that up front is that people are willing to give it a whirl and see what they can give and get from the situation.

Christian Crumlish, Greg Nudelman, and Jason Cranford Teague all willingly threw themselves under this bus to give it a shot. Here’s what we learned:

  • Each session had some slight technical glitches–all very minor, but each session probably started 3-5 minutes behind as we either were troubleshooting or working through alternative solutions. (Part of this is that we had a dated version of Adobe Connect, frankly)
  • Despite the glitches, each presentation was very solid, and these presenters are true professionals–they were aces, so any criticism you see here has nothing to do with their performances whatsoever. If anything, seeing them remotely taught me that what they do is great regardless of the medium.
  • After the first session, with Christian, we learned that back lighting prevented us from seeing his face, so I was asking for less backlight from there. (In hindsight, I should have asked Christian to play some music on his ukelele while we were warming up and even closing out.)
  • Bandwidth was sometimes an issue–Greg had to kill his video during his session, but it helped tremendously when it came to the audio hiccups we were experience; we need to make sure both sides of the line have as fast of a connection as possible, and we need to be aware that sometimes video won’t be our best option, which is okay as long as the slides and the audio come through.
  • We learned in Jason’s session that our Adobe Connect software was dated since he couldn’t do HTML slides in the system. We resolved by quickly using a free join.me session and it worked really well. And I was able to stop sweating and let a very experienced presenter do his thing, very well.
  • The audience also wanted the presenter to know that they were there, so we switched to my Macbook Pro instead of the PC machine in the room.
  • After each session, I asked the room if they thought these talks were valuable. It was met with a resounding and very vocal “YES!” which was a great proof of concept.
  • We handled Q&A via my cell phone and muted our computer’s mic. It was okay, but we need to be better at that and we’ll figure something out for the next time.
  • I think we could probably have a better display setting for the dashboard so that we can see more of the presenter and their slides without taking away from the content. Presenters were in a small video space in the corner, and being able to see them a bit better may have helped, but I also see how that could be a bit distracting to the presenter.

Overall: This went really well. As good as I expected, if not better! And I expected some setup glitches–the hardest part for me, as host of this particular track/room, was the stress of feeling that I needed to be in that specific room the entire time in case anything went down. That was pretty tense for me, but it wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things.

I also learned not to do remote sessions back-to-back in the future; a little break helps a lot when technology is stuck in the middle. Five minutes between the sessions definitely wasn’t enough with the remote sessions. We’ll get better at this, and smarter in the future, for certain.

And finally, I learned that maybe we shouldn’t call it “Remote Track” but instead just make sure we really inform people that the presentations will be presented by brilliant people in remote locations (No one thought my “we should call it ‘Pants-less Track’” was as amusing as I did, and wisely so, I think). No one complained about this, but onsite we were a lot more aware that it maybe did not represent the room all that well as we also had some in-person presenters, too.

In summary: We’ll do it again, I’m pretty sure. It was a great experiment and we know we’ll get better at it–it also allows us to bring in great talent without forcing them to be in Chicago, and they can still share their smarts with people. It’s something that makes sense to do, especially for a smaller conference like this where we have a cap at 100 people. For larger events, I’m not sure how I’d scope that out. Moving forward, we’ll likely check how we can make these presentations more accessible to the outside world, or how we can record them for later use.

Huge thanks to Christian, Greg, Jason, and Harrington College (Andy Hullinger & Gabe Caskey) for really hanging in there with us and giving this a shot.

We had a lot of fun–and we’re looking forward to Speaker Camp–hope to see you there!

SXSW Interactive 2013 – From Muppets to Mastery: UX Principles from Jim Henson

I was very fortunate to end up in the mix for SXSW Interactive this year, and very excited to get to share a presentation that I’m very passionate about. I always appreciate the opportunities to get to present things that I am passionate about to a group of people, and I am fully aware of how fortunate that I am to get to do this. This presentation means the world to me, and it’s one of those that I really hope I get to share again. At SXSW Interactive this year, I think it was a great fit and I’m still riding the high from it a week later!



Backstory

I took my oldest daughter to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry over a holiday break, and the Smithsonian’s exhibit of Henson and the Muppets was one of the attractions. I bought us tickets and through our normal “getting lost in the museum” thing that we do (it is filled with SCIENCE, after all!) we stumbled into the exhibit. And that’s where it happened: my daughter did her thing–she found the activities and played, found ways to express herself in drawing, and I, well, I got lost–completely–in this wonderful set of worlds that this incredible man had created.

It was great–a lot of fun–to experience so many of the Henson creations. I was mixed with joy and sadness; I was clearly late to the game. I’ve always known about the Muppets, I watched the movies, and I was nerdy and geeky so I saw Dark Crystal and Labyrinth and, well, I knew my way around the topic, but I clearly hadn’t been paying near enough attention while Henson had been alive. The more I walked the exhibit, the more I got caught taking pictures of things that reminded me of how a lot of us in the UX community work–lots of sketching, storyboards, patterns, iterations… I was drawn in, sucked in, as entirely as a person can be. I found myself scouring Amazon for everything I could learn about Henson, searching through old book stores, Goodwill stores, old libraries–you name it–to find as much as I could to learn more about this amazing man.

Somewhere along the way, I ended up with a couple of Muppets of my own (Slide 39–and if you’re ever at FAO Schwarz in NYC near that one Apple store, well, go to the Whatnot Workshop and build one of your own, too!) and found myself drawing from the similarities of Henson’s world to my own, and hopefully to the broader world of UX. I took something that was a brief 13 minute topic at WebVisions to a full session last year at Big Design (where I was *very* lucky to have received a lot of critical feedback from Jared Spool that convinced me to not sunset the talk, but to instead revise and improve it–thanks Jared!) to a very fun presentation at this year’s SXSW.

If you happened to have been one of the people who stopped by the talk instead of hanging out with Al Gore or the “Future of Porn” presentation–thank you! I hope you had as much fun as I had giving the talk–and I really did have a lot of fun; the material is so fun to share, so fun to talk about!

If you didn’t, you can check out the slides and the audio above! I hope you enjoy this as much as I do, and I am hopeful to get to present this again!

Gratitude

I mentioned that I started doing this talk awhile ago, and that it has been in a rather constant state of evolution. If it hadn’t been for Jared Spool providing me with some extremely valuable critique, I would have likely sent this talk into the sunset. That all happened at a time when everything was spinning into a pretty big toilet bowl (and a bigger toilet bowl than I could have imagined at that point), and some guidance and input was sorely needed, just in general. I received critique on my talk, but a lot of it worked into other areas of my world then.

On top of that, I wisely attended the “Tweak Your Talk” workshop at SXSW; not only do I help out with those things, but I also throw myself under the bus and look for assistance with my own material, as well. I received incredibly valuable feedback from Dan Willis, Adam Polansky, Laura Creekmore, David Panarelli, and the entirety of the attendees in that session. My introduction was weak, and a comparison of the Fraggles to project teams wasn’t as well-connected as it needed to be. This group kicked me squarely in the ribs–which I asked them to do–and that got me steered in the right direction.

And it would be foolish of me to not mention Brad Nunnally. He not only served as roommate who had to listen to me talking about this talk non-stop, but he also guarded a muppet with his life, retrieved books that I had to give away and forgot about, and was a pretty superior friend throughout it all. He’s seen this talk go through its evolution more than anyone, and he still managed to show up for the session when he had every right to bow out and check out Al Gore, who likely had some fresh content.

I look forward to seeing how this continues to evolve.

Identity.com Wants to Own Your Identity. Kind Of.

The tl;dr version:

  • Don’t sign up for an account with Identity.com; they will not let you ever fully delete your information.
  • You can unlink services, and that access to information is gone to them.
  • Not letting people delete account information is a lousy practice. Avoid Identity.com.

The full version:

I signed-up for Identity.com without doing the normal read & regret of their terms and conditions and privacy policy. This, of course, is my fault, and I’ll admit to falling into the trap due to the recommendation of a friend, but that’s hardly an excuse.

I signed up. I linked a couple of services (LinkedIn, Facebook) and took a look at the interface. Neat enough, I suppose, but it didn’t really show me much that I didn’t already know about myself, so the site sat in the ether with my information.

I decided to delete my account. I visited the site, but could not find a way to accomplish this.

I contacted their Customer Support asking to delete my account, and this is the response I received:

Thank you for contacting Identity.com!

Your identity.com account is yours to keep and cannot be totally deactivated, but you can control whether other people can see your public profile. Please note that once you remove a service from your account, identity.com will no longer have access to your data from that service.

To change how others view your public profile, go to Account Settings

When you select “Only me”, only you will be able to view your public profile and all the information it contains. Your name will not appear in search results.

You will still be able to sign in to your identity.com account and view your own profile, and you can change your settings at any time.

Please let me know if I can help you further.

Sincerely,
Mxxxxxx S
Identity Support Team Member

The bolding is mine. I’m sure the wording is carefully chosen, but if I cannot totally deactivate an account, I’m not happy.

They will also no longer have access to my data from a service that I remove–but what about all the accessed data before that? Did they store it? They don’t really say, and if I can’t totally remove an account, I don’t totally trust a company to do what’s right in this situation.

This is a poor experience for me. It’s a risk that I took, and this is, again, my fault. It’s entirely too easy to have your digital data exist everywhere, and in the hands of entities that may not have your best interests in mind, and I’m generally pretty cautious about this. My hope is that a service like Identity.com will fizzle and die before they get an opportunity to do anything malicious, but there’s no real way for me to actually know.

Buyer <ahem> beware.

Until Identity.com can update their policy in regards to accounts, I’d avoid them.

Keys to the Kingdom Tour

I made (was granted) the time to go to the “Keys to the Magic Kingdom Tour” so I could learn a bit more about Disney World, one of my favorite places, and Disney, the company who makes the magic. It was a really nice tour, with Sean, a fantastic tour guide who had more information tucked away inside of him than you would have thought possible. Without further delay, here are my raw, feverishly typed-out-on-my-iPhone-til-the-battery-died-iPhone notes. There are a bunch of fat-finger typos that I keep finding and correcting, and I apologize in advance if I’ve mis-typed (or mis-heard) anything that is here, and welcome corrections and additions!

  • 62k cast members. Largest on-site employer.
  • Main Street train station acts as a curtain
  • Posters are on the walls on the outside are like previews
  • Lots from movie industry; designed like shots
  • They award building windows to long term employees
  • Roy O. Disney is Walt’s brother and provided financial wizardry to get this built
  • Downtown resembles Marcelene, MO, his home town. His memory of it; not reality :-)
  • Mortimer was Mickey’s first name. Walt’s wife said no. Mickey it was.
  • Snow White cost 1.5 million to make. Made 8 million. Lots of dimes and nickels. Do some math here Russ.
  • Initially theme parks were thought of as disgusting, dirty places. Walt made fun of them in Pinocchio where the kids all turned into donkeys.
  • Walt didn’t like being able to see all the hotels etc from Disneyland. Decided if he did this again he’d make the fantasy better.
  • This is where the Epcot community/city notion came from–city of tomorrow. Infrastructure etc. cars only drive underground.
  • Add “magic” to something at Disney and you’ve got a parade; being in marketing is easy.
  • If you lived in Epcot and GE created a prototype product you could get it for free. (Example; paraphrased)
    42 square miles of land. 1/3 never to be touched as a reserve, 1/3 not yet used. Has landfills, tree farms, etc. twice the size of Manhattan.
  • Called the Grand Floridian add-on the DVC & said he’s not supposed to say
  • Walt died at 65; Roy came out of retirement to finish. Walt never saw more than swampland. Bummer.
  • No Disney family members have any influence in the company. Walls nephew, Roy’s son, had a fight with Eisner to save Disney, but that was it.
  • At the end of Walt’s life he was focused in Epcot and CalArts; trusted the Imagineers to finish it.
  • Disney was built by a man, Magic Kingdom, etc. by committee.
  • Steve Jobs was the largest shareholder for a long time
  • First day staffers spend time at Disney University and learning traditions in the park. Used to be a 2-hour session, now full day.
  • General attitude is that Disney is less strict. Growth means they need to hire more applicants.
  • In 71 had around 5500 employees. They’re always hiring. Majority of hires are college and international.
  • Growth and culture shifts have loosened the strictness.
  • Example was if they had no uniforms to fit you, you just couldn’t work that thing.
  • Until 1982 men couldn’t be your guides or in guest relations.
  • Tattoos have to covered. Rule.
  • Most internships are paid with some room and board. Some of the more advanced internships such as Imagineers are unpaid.
  • All the parks will be getting Starbucks soon
  • Disney has undercover security in the park and on the outside. If you’re anywhere in Disney in a public area you are probably on camera.
  • Obama was here this year. They had to wall off Main Street. The top of the contemporary was closed off, etc.
  • They had 36 hours to prep for Obama; an operational nightmare and lots of cancellations, etc.
    use forced-perspective to make things look and feel bigger-buildings on Main Street and the castle appear bigger than they are and farther away.
  • We have no TinkerBills (someone asked if Tinkerbell was male or female)
  • Top of castle is 189 feet
  • People get to stay in the suite–celebrities and VIPs and make a wish. Involves generous donations to charities etc.
  • They are a business first; in the 80s there were threats/fears of hostile take over and shift in how it works.
  • 2 types of cast members. Walt-people and progressive types. Some in between. Interesting discussion about how audience has changed and can’t treat us in a fake way.
  • Rides are inspected every night very thoroughly.
  • They do sensory tickles. First palm tree after the Main Street and at crystal palace. Leads you to Adventureland area.
  • Tour guide has a masters from Taiwan and can speak mandarin. Don’t judge the book by the cover.
    all volcanic rock around Swiss family Robinson tree.
  • Ground color changes as a sensory tickle for the next area while in Adventureland.
  • Theme park connection is a website to learn from
  • Enchanted tiki room is first animatronic experience. Roof is faux thatch made of aluminum
  • More sensory tickle of ground and fences as we move to the plaza
  • Pirates of Caribbean was a Walt thought of a pirate museum. Sad trombone; didn’t happen but the better experience did. Under the waterfall is actually going under the railroad tracks. Before the waterfall everyone is dead/skeletons and after its like time travel because they’re all alive.
  • More sensory tickles. Ground, lamp posts, horticultural shifts to preview next area.
  • Back stage. No photos or video here. Nothing. This is a fire-able offense for staff.
  • Warning to keep quiet so we don’t ruin it for the “little ears”
  • Talking of getting rid of the tour because of Dark Side of Disney (book) and they would sneak through and get photos, etc. fan club D23 is after these people, etc. basically, they’re jerks trying to ruin the experience/magic (my opinion)
  • Yellow sight line so characters know when they need to be performing or not.
  • Most parade rehearsals are done back stage. Real dress rehearsals are done late at night or early mornings to preserve experience.
  • Boom. We’re backstage. “Smells like six flags” says one guy. He’s right.
  • Pirates building is painted “go away green” so it blends in with local foliage.
  • Produces about 40-45% of their own energy. Methane gas from water hyacinths on a lake.
  • Splash mountain reservoir is 20 feet deep. Have 2 spare pumps in case some go out. They capture any waste etc here. Don’t use chlorine; bromine. Won’t stain clothes and has the smell. Turn off pumps and all water empties in about 45 minutes from gravity for splash mountain.
  • They don’t paint nor build what an eye can’t see.
  • Paw prints on ground in case of evacuation so kids can easily find their way out.
  • Production center holds Ll the parade floats. Inside is for night time floats. They operate on the equivalent of golf cart batteries. They all have drivers in them.
  • Sometimes the driver isn’t hidden but instead disguised or in costume.
  • Told the story of a float has a joystick. One has 2 levers for 360 control like a lawn mower.
  • Mushroom buttons allow cast members to hit them and force a stop to prevent accidents with people or debris.
  • Night time lights are basically Christmas tree lights. Every other light is a different strand to prevent full blackout.
  • Most floats built on location, but based upon cost it may be outsourced.
  • All the costumes–fur characters, etc. are done here. Security and some others may be outsourced.
  • Talking about shifts for characters to keep them cool.
  • Talking about pantomime for auditions of characters. Characters are based upon person height; “mouse group” – Mickey usually played by a woman because of height.
  • Showed a float that is 30 years old. Was a Snow White float, now a Xmas float.
  • Some floats have scents-ors that will push out smells.
  • Floats get general maintenance everyday so they don’t die on stage. Casts may spend time doing cleaning and light maintenance daily, too.
  • Face characters do their own make-up. They get trained by cosmetology team. They do half themselves as they go, they graduate by doing it themselves.
  • They’ll drain water in the canal when they know a hurricane, etc. so they can prepare.
  • Back to the park.
  • And off to lunch!
  • They have a creek they call the Little Mississippi because it divides the east and west sides.
  • Lunch at the Columbia Harbor House on the 2nd floor.
  • Chimed in about some Henson facts and have spent a lot of time talking about Jim at lunch.
  • People reveling And chuckling at how many notes I’ve taken and my battery is at 15%
  • You can request VIP tours by your guide for upto around $175 (?) hour.
  • Haunted mansion based upon the Henry Packer museum in Jim Thorpe, Virginia
  • This is the only place with blood red roses
  • Horticulture chosen to look more forlorn
  • Lawn is handcut to make it purposefully uneven
  • Tombstones are names of Imagineers who created the haunted mansion
  • Tour guide has been here 7 years
  • In California the stretch room is an elevator. Here the walls get higher.
  • They use a lot of really old parlor tricks as effects
  • Steam boat goes by and razzed the guide–loud long horn blows, mocking. Nice touch.
  • Ghosts in the ballroom – has a bunch of reflections in glass based on light flickers.
  • There is a hidden Mickey in the dining room plates. Official now; used to be just from the maids and cleaning staff.
  • Albert Hague did deep voice in the Haunted Mansion; also did Mean One Mr. Grinch, Tony the Tiger, bears, etc.
  • Graveyard has a hidden Mickey. In the crypt is a keeper, the left hand has a silhouette. When the buggy turns to the left, lean out and look to the right to see it on the crypt keeper.
  • Tour guide says tour guides are bottom of the barrel and don’t have a lot of sway/social currency.
  • New projects appear to be more skewed toward enhancing/re-vitalizing the park. Instead of adding a 5th gate; labor supply/shortage is a factor.
  • Disney Springs will be the new name for Downtown Disney.
  • First mention of Star Wars at 1p. Tour started at 9:30a.
  • Rumors are that Disneyland Paris would be the best prepared to get a Star Wars themed area.
  • Next stop: utilidors.
  • Liberty bell is cast from same mold as original but the crack they did on their own.
  • Christmas lasts about 3 months here. On November 2 all the Halloween decorations go down and 36 hours later all the Xmas decorations are up. Xmas music loop in Main Street is 30m long.
    2nd floors are used for office buildings.
  • Parking lot for parade staging.
  • In the utilidors. Mash location signs. No smoking here. Cement corridors. Incredibly underwhelming and amazing at the same time. Break rooms, offices, etc. everything is accessible down here so no one has to make holes in the park.
  • Facades on buildings are about 6 feet to allow for lighting effects, etc.
  • Roy Disney did the dedication but only after Mickey showed up; Roy felt it was a personification of Walt and made him comfortable.
  • 2 months later in December, Roy passed away. Many think he stayed alive long enough to see his brother’s dream come true.
  • When he passed away, they named a train after Roy.
  • Buggy in front of haunted mansion is a real old child’s hearse.
  • Until the late 80s all the skeletons on properties were real.
  • Showed an out-of-use Scents-or; they used to pump a “cookie dough” smell in/near a bakery to get people in and wanting fresh cookies. Andy Budd does a talk about Persuasion and how McDonald’s has done something similar.
  • Wigs – Real people get fake hair, fake people get real hair. Some of the “It’s a Small World” dolls have “yarn” hair and it grows in in the summers so they have to sometimes trim it. In the winter it may contract so it may need to be replanted. Fake hair is relatively inexpensive so they can customize wigs easily for staff. Real hair is expensive, but it goes on fake people that they know will never leave. The leg hair on some of the Pirates of the Caribbean pirates is real hair!
  • Tinkerbell – They have 5 people playing the role; 3 full time, 2 part time. Women, weighing between 95 – 105lbs. Weight and the “kick” they receive from the castle (can’t be pushed or the pusher might and up going for the ride) determine how far Tinkerbell flies. If she stops short, she’ll turn off her lights and hand-pull herself to the end of the line. 1 of the people who plays Tinkerbell is on maternity leave after having her second child.
  • Pin replacement – they have a station where staff members can replenish their pins; staff can trade / give away pins to people who collect them.
  • Executive parking – the executive parking is closest to the Magic Kingdom; right behind Main Street. Not a lot of high-end vehicles; more sensible–but nice cars (just my observation)
  • Water at Epcot – the water/pond at Epcot is filled with water from all over the world; kids were asked to bring water to pour into it

How I Plan a Presentation

As Dan, Brad, and I continue working on “Designing the Conversation”, I am finding helpful snippets that may–or may not–make the final cut of the final product. This is largely an unedited draft, directly from Chapter 3: Structure and Flow, and I hope you will forgive the rawness of the excerpt.

Without further delay, I present to you a fairly extreme example of how I plan a presentation.

Once I have identified the topic for a presentation that I want to share with an audience, I find myself a nice, quite time of day and hunker down in my office for some focused thinking and planning.

Usually, this is around midnight.

When I know my topic, it is typically one I am very familiar with, and I know that there are key areas of learning that I have gone through that will be useful to other people, so get out a pencil and start putting those ideas to paper. I write down as many of them as I can, adding any notes or hints as to what the deeper dive into my content is going to be. I keep going at this until I feel I have exhausted my depth on the topic.

Next, I take a look at all of the content and the notes that I have brain-dumped and analyze them for logical groupings—are there multiple elements that could fit into a single category or topic area? Are there those that have overlap into various higher-level topics and could those start to emerge as a theme for the presentation? My sheet of paper ends up with a lot of hash marks, circles, arrows and extra notes that probably only make sense to me at this point.

After tearing off that sheet of paper, I will put the content together on a new sheet of paper in the topics or categories that started to materialize on the previous page. I will “box them up” and separate them into sections on the page so I can make sure that each high-level topic area has enough content to merit its existance, and start to add and subtract content as it makes sense. Once I go through this activity, I will give each section a number that indicates the flow from topic to topic. A little secret here: This is a point where I will try to find a friend who will actually listen and provide harsh feedback on the idea and the flow. Ten minutes on Skype or a phone call can make all the difference in the world.

Once I feel comfortable with my content areas and flow, I will fire up my favorite word processesing program and start to transcribe an honest-to-goodness outline based on all of the pencil and paper effort that I have done so far. The content generally starts to really form in my mind at this point, and it gets even easier to find the gaps and/or disconnected parts of the presentation. This outline is solidifying all of the thinking that I have done so far, and really feels more like I am playing the role of my own editor.

To many, this might seem like a good time to open up their favorite presentation software and get to work, but time has shown me that by moving my outline to large-sized note cards using a permanent marker that I can start to build my presentation as “notecard wireframes” (see, they are not dead!). By taking the notecard approach, I can start to identify my master slides and the overall design system for the presentation. I also continue to move topic areas around and tinker with structure easily by simply moving cards around on the wall or the floor, which helps to even further work out the kinks in the material.

Note cards of a presentation before slide creationNote cards of a presentation before slide creation

Once I am comfortable with my notecards, I will fire up Keynote and start to build out my presentation, usually laboring over font and color selection far longer than any sane person should, and then I really start to build out my slides in earnest.

Magnetic Whiteboard Wall(paper)

The tl;dr Version

  • Buy Rustoleum Magnetic Primer
  • Buy Whiteboard wall statics
  • Mix the primer very well. Mix it some more.
  • Apply primer to walls. I used about 7 coats; packaging suggests 3, but 7 is great for me
  • Measure and cut the whiteboards, apply to the walls, remove the bubbles
  • Get neodymium magnets for the walls to make sure you get a solid hold

The Full Version

My office is an odd shape–it’s not exactly square. Instead, there is about a 4 foot area that is on a 45-degree angle that makes the room only 10 feet wide in some parts and 12 feet wide in the other, and the entry door is in the angled portion. This is not a complaint, but it does make the space sort of difficult to do anything fun with.

The short wall is about 5.5 feet wide and 7 feet tall, and the space around the door is about 5 inches on one side and 12 inches on the other. Hey, I am not perfectly in the middle, but the door is in the right place. It would make sense if you were looking at it, and you would not even notice my imperfections. I hope.

There used to be a 2′ x 3′ whiteboard wall static on the space. I used it to keep track of my writing schedules and word counts and delivery dates. Plenty of imperfections in this little space, too.

I have always lusted a bit after those whiteboard painted walls–and I am pretty positive that I am not the only one.

The problem, of course, is that there is a substantial amount of waiting, and quite a bit of praying, I think, to make this work. I have seen these walls in offices where you can tell that what was once there is leaving parts of its dry erase soul in the paint. I have heard horror stories of vulgarities and inappropriate drawings being permanently etched into public-facing walls. One of my friends tells me that his company has their cleaning staff meticulously wipe down ALL of their walls every evening in order to prevent the ghosting and other leave-behind marks from staking their claim.

Anyway. It all seems like a gigantic pain in the rear, and nowhere near as simple as just taking wall statics and sticking them on the walls. The problem with the wall statics, of course, is that they do not have an edge like a hanging board, so it is easy to go off the whiteboard space and leave marks on the paint, which is not difficult to repair but I always feel like an idiot, or at least more of an idiot than normal. And they are not magnetic, which means tape is needed if you want to stick anything to the wall.

The solution: Rustoleum Magnetic Primer and Whiteboard wall statics!

Step 1: Prime the Wall

(I am going to assume that you will remove the light switch and outlet covers, and apply painters tape as appropriate.)

Do not be scared off by the less than stellar reviews at Amazon for this primer. It really is not that difficult to use if you read the instructions and understand how to use it. Mostly, it is mix well, apply a coat, let it dry, apply another coat, and so on.

My space was about 7′ tall by about 5′ 8″ and I bought 5 cans of the Rustoleum Metallic Primer. It’s around $20 per can, so keep that in mind. If you buy it at a DIY store, ask the paint department to shake the cans for you before you leave, especially if you are going to start the project right away. Once you open the cans, you will need to mix them. And mix them. The bottom of the cans will feel like they have sludge in the bottom, but that is just the mixture of metal filings–the stuff that makes it magnetic–settling in the bottom (yes, even when the cans have been shaken). Apply the primer.

Wait about 30 minutes. Do the next coat. We did not test after the first coat, but after the second coat, magnets were sticking to the wall already and it made it a bit more fun, but there was more to do. We ended up putting a total of 7 coats on the walls, and it was challenging to not get clumps of the metallic filings in areas–keep that in mind when you paint.

Oh, and ventilate the area; this stuff is toxic smelling and it gets pretty intense.

Step 2: Apply the Whiteyboards

This is the most difficult part and it took us about 2 – 2.5 hours. But we needed to cut to fit, and then there is the smoothing out of the air bubbles and all that. It sounds easy, but it was a 2-person job with the big 4′ x 6′ whiteboards.

One important thing to note: unroll the Whiteyboards and let them sit for a day or so if you can. It just helps to have them get the chance to be unrolled and flattened for a bit.

Spend the time getting out as many of the air bubbles as you can. In some cases, you will be lifting up areas that you just busted your hump to get down flat because it is the only way to get the bubbles out, but the squeegees that the folks from Whiteyboard provide are pretty good at helping you along the way. It will be tough to get this perfect, and if your wall is like mine, you will have plenty of imperfections and a bunch of clumps from the primer, but they will not be major. More importantly, those clumps really will not affect how you use the whiteboard space.

There is one last, very important thing to note: Do not think you will be able to use standard, run-of-the-mill refrigerator magnets. Unless you put a metallic wall behind the whiteboards, the magnetic force will not be as intense as you hope for.

Instead, pick up some neodymium magnets for the walls. They are strong. VERY strong. So strong that they were able to stay together on both sides of my hands. They can be tough to pull apart from each other, but they hold quite a bit to the walls very well.

And finally, here is the wall space in context of the entire office:

Good luck!

 

On Falling Down. Or Getting Up.

Today I watched my children play in the back yard while I was trying to perfect a pattern that allows me to mow the lawn the same way each and every time. For what it’s worth, I have not yet won this pattern battle, and we’ve lived here nearly seven years.

As often happens when I am allowed to play observer with my children, I (re)learned a lesson today.

As the kids played, they laughed. A lot.

As they played, they also fell down. A lot.

Both things happened at the same time, most of the time (hey, they’re kids, after all).

Every time they fell down–even when I had a reaction of “oh crap, that one had to hurt!”–they got up, still laughing.

Sometimes they did not even bother to dust themselves off or collect themselves a bit. In fact, they mostly just kept going. And going. And laughing. And falling. And laughing some more.

I am, I think, afraid of falling just as much as any person is, if not more. I think that most people, even those of us who will say that failure is okay, do not like to fail. Falling down, well, it kind of sucks. Especially when you are an adult, or when you have eyes on you, or when you put pressures upon yourself, or when you want to reach goals or expectations, or when others are relying on you.

Or, you know, just in general.

So, while I will continue to dislike my failures and flaws, and while I will continue to hate my mistakes–and often myself for them (and for a really, really long time)–I think it is important to at least remember what my kids already seem to know:

You might just as well keep going, because you will fall again, and it only sucks if you worry so much about falling that it keeps you from moving forward at all. And, you get to get back and and keep moving, anyway. There’s always something else/more to do.

Wireframes Versus Prototypes

This is simple:

Use whichever communication tool that works best for your context. Your context can include your own needs, skill level, client needs, client sophistication, time, etc.

Revisit and adjust your approach as your context changes.

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