The 3 Steps to Creating an Experience Vision
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-content/the-3-steps-for-creating-an-experience-vision-004454.php
In the article I chose for this chapter, the author discusses some of the challenges project teams face when business needs overwhelm the needs of users and describes how many teams use an “experience vision” to overcome this.
An experience vision is a detailed idea of what the team wants the end users to see and feel when using the project’s work. This experience is independent of the technologies used or the products offered, but is a major component of user satisfaction. Developing an experience vision can help a team see what their real end goal is, beyond meeting the business expectations underlying it. The article’s author describes three steps in developing this vision.
The first step is about finding the inspiration for your vision. The author discusses using consumer research to find places where users are unhappy with their current experiences, even if the users themselves can’t identify an alternative they would like better. Innovation, then, is to find that alternative. More than innovation, though, even very simple things, like placing commonly used links and functions where they can be found quickly, can improve a user’s experience with a product. The vision is about finding a way to help users enjoy using the end product, by making it easier and more rewarding to use.
The second step is about making sure the vision is genuinely about the user and not the technology that makes it work. An experience vision describes all of the ways in which the product impacts a user’s life, a rule that rarely includes concerns about changing technologies.
The third step is communicating the experience vision to the team, so that everyone is on the same page, sharing the same goal. In the same way that incremental goals helps a team stay on task and meeting deadlines, the long-term goal represented by the experience vision motivates the team and lets them gauge how far they’ve come.
Spool, Jared M. “The 3 Steps for Creating an Experience Vision” cmswire.com.
Published April 23rd, 2009. Retrieved Nov. 12th, 2009 from http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-content/the-3-steps-for-creating-an-experience-vision-004454.php
Google Apologizes
This article is about Google’s response to customer complaints about its Gmail email service going down on Tuesday. It also demonstrates a very real problem that most successful online businesses face: how to manage customer usage with necessary maintenance.
In Google’s case, they took a few servers down for routine maintenance, but underestimated the load this would put on the remaining servers, leading to the email service becoming unavailable. But most companies that maintain their own servers have to make a decision at some point how they’ll manage downtime due to maintenance.
This relates to the efficiency/effectiveness metrics in the first chapter of our book. At one extreme, a system that is down often for maintenance or even upgrades is of little use to the company or its customers. At the other, a system that never receives maintenance must inevitably fail or become so outdated that it no longer meets customer needs (whether that is simply due to being slower or because it can’t mesh with newer software).
In my experience, companies will generally attempt one of two solutions. They will either stagger maintenance in such a way that most services or even enough machines to keep up all service, as Google tried to do, or they will schedule maintenance in advance, notifying their customers about when to expect service interruption, much like utilities do.
These strategies each has its own problems. As the article shows, staggered maintenance may require enormous redundancy and extra capacity to handle the traffic normally carried by the whole system, particularly if traffic is higher than expected. Planned maintenance may still cost the company sales and customers during the outage, no matter how clearly announced, and if a problem occurs with the work it might cause the interruption to be delayed well past the planned period, losing still more business.
Reference: Kuhn, Eric. (September, 2009). Google apologizes, explains Gmail outage. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/01/gmail.outage/index.html
NVision Solutions: Mapping Data
In this article, the author introduces a company that creates decision support software combining geographic information systems and maps. This allows customers to visually analyze data discovering patterns and problems that would be difficult to discern in a database or spreadsheet.
The idea is pretty simple. Map the customer’s data to an image of the relevant area and analyze for any patterns appear once the location is included. This technology could be very useful for many kinds of businesses, potentially leading to improved decisions in the location of new stores, more precisely mapping customer demographics, and better design of systems that depend on geography, like irrigation and city planning. But NVision’s special interest is emergency management, making sure that emergency response knows just what areas are hardest hit and just what sort of terrain they’ll find when they get there.
This is an example of a decision support system (DSS). A DSS integrates information from a variety of sources in a way that is meaningful and lets the user see patterns more readily than he/she could from the plain data. Much like the digital dashboards shown in our book, NVision’s maps make it obvious when an issue is causing data to bunch up within a certain area, whereas a list of addresses might not make that clear even if you knew the area. The result of DSS is faster and hopefully better decisions.
Reference: Cure, Sarah. (2009, Aug. 22nd). NVision matches up maps with information. Sun Herald. Retrieved from http://www.sunherald.com/business/story/1555179.html
Ebay sells Skype
In this article, Elizabeth Woyke discusses the recent sale of the rapidly growing internet calling service Skype by its parent company, Ebay. Specifically, 65% interest in Skype was sold to a number of venture capital investors, including Silver Lake Partners and Index Ventures. Although the management, largely coming over from Ebay, won’t change, the business certainly might, possibly making the moves soon to become a publicly traded firm.
When Ebay started Skype, the management believed the calling service would improve its primary internet auctions business, allowing buyers and sellers to make better contact and more transactions. Unfortunately for Ebay, that didn’t happen, but with revenues of over $550 million they probably aren’t too upset about it. Nevertheless, their inability to make it mesh with their core business was cited as part of the reason for selling the service. Another reason is likely to be the pending litigation with regards to the peer to peer technology Skype operates on.
Skype is growing rapidly, with the number of users rising by 19% over the past six months and expected to make annual profits over $1 billion by 2011. In fact, the reason I found this article interesting was because I’ve recently been hearing Skype brought up in conversation more and more often. It’s becoming a popular solution for video conferencing between two widely separated groups or just for the pleasure of seeing a distant loved one’s face when they can make a call. I think that as Skype become more popular, we’re going to see some significant effects on the communications industry as a whole.
References: Woyke, Elizabeth. “Skype’s Independent Future.” Forbes, September 1st, 2009. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/01/ebay-google-andreessen-technology-internet-skype.html
Caulfield, Brian. “Ebay: ‘We were wrong’.” Forbes, March 11th, 2009. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/11/ebay-skype-internet-technology-internet-ebay.html
Google acquires reCAPTCHA
While registering for various services and websites on the internet, I’m sure you’ve come across a box that has an oddly printed word or overlapping block letters asking you to type the word or alphanumeric combination. These sort of anti-bot technologies are called CAPTCHAs, intended to be easy enough for humans to identify the characters, but prevent automatic programs from registering.
In the linked article, Ryan Naraine talks about the purchase of reCAPTCHA, a company that creates a popular form of them, and how Google might use the company’s technology to improve both scanning print into plain text and their own security.
One of the basic necessities for most spammers and phishers (people who use mass emails to try to steal personal information) is an enormous number of email accounts. No matter how many account names you block with anti-spam filters, you can’t hope to completely block off someone with thousands of accounts. So sites that provide free email accounts, like Yahoo! and Google, face off against people trying to register incredible numbers of accounts using program tools that simply fill in the registration form and register automatically, as fast as the connection permits!
By posting an image that isn’t in anything like plain text and having the person registering answer certain questions about the image, CAPTCHAs make it difficult for simpler programs to do this. As bot programs become more sophisticated, they have some ability to scan the image and possibly correctly identify the obscured word, but they still contribute some improvement to the usually poor security of email.
Naraine, Ryan. “Google + reCAPTCHA could raise bar in anti-bot, anti-spam battle.” ZDnet.com. September 16, 2009. Retrieved from http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=4328
This article relates to an unusual aspect of supply chain management: the environment and guilt by association. Apple is the main company being discussed here, but essentially all major computer manufacturers (Original Equipment Manufacturers, OEM) outsource the physical construction of their systems. Like Dell in the chapter’s case example, most of Apple’s suppliers are in Taiwan and/or China, which can make it expensive and difficult to ensure that conditions and product quality are up to the standards of Apple’s policies.
As a group, OEMs often come under fire due to the environmental impact of improperly discarded electronics equipment. Everything from monitors to motherboards can be seriously damaging to the environment, due to the materials released as the item breaks down and the sheer length of time it can take plastics and silicon to break down into natural compounds.
Apple was rated ahead of major competitors Dell and HP, because it’s making a visible effort to reduce or eliminate particularly harmful compounds, like PVCs, from its products, a move environmental watchdog groups support. However, these groups are also interested in the environmental impact of Apple’s own corporate operations, data that Apple execs have been keeping under their hats. This information includes things like a greenhouse gas inventory, fossil fuel use, and waste recycling.
The article ends by saying Apple does in fact release most of the information the watchdog groups want, if not in the same way they’d like it (cough, easy to read, cough), and questions how recent their studies are. So perhaps Apple is cleaning up all over!
Bertolucci, Jeff. “How Green is Apple: Cleaning the Supply Chain” Macworld.com, April 22nd, 2009. (Mac Publishing LLC, 2009). Retrieved from http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/163608/how_green_is_apple_cleaning_the_supply_chain.html on Oct. 15th, 2009.
