Speaking of Simple…

Courtesy of Kathy Sierra and her Creating Passionate Users blog:

 Why do so many companies treat potential users so much better than existing users? Think about it. The brochure is a thing of beauty, while the user manual is a thing of boredom. The brochure gets the big budget while the manual gets the big index. What if we stopped making the docs we give away for free SO much nicer than the ones the user paid for? What if instead of seducing potential users to buy, we seduced existing users to learn?

This entry hit me like a ton of bricks tonite…and it’s so darn SIMPLE!  I’ve been following this blog for several months now, and I think Kathy’s right on nearly all the time, but her timing today is impeccable.  In my current role, I’m responsible for “creating passionate users” for my company’s new online info delivery platform.  And, as we’re in the early stages of a fairly large-scale rollout, a lot of my time has been spent on creating training plans, and figuring out how best to position our product with our customer base.  Perhaps it’s coincidence, perhaps it’s Jupiter aligning with Pluto (or some other non-planet entity), but this week it hit me – we need better collateral for our customers!  But I can’t take credit for this discovery…it came from – a customer, who gently asked “is this all you have?” when presented with our existing manual. 

Kathy’s promised a future post that will talk about ways to accomplish some of this without a big budget – I can’t wait, cuz like nearly everyone else in Corporate America, I think I’m going to have a tough time finding a lot of budget money for this effort…

Virtual Hotel in Second Life

If you’re a fan of Second Life, and even if you’re not, you should check out this weblog that details the construction of Second Life’s first “real world” hotel chain in-world.  Starwood Hotels has engaged virtual service firm The Electric Sheep Company and marketing firm Electric Artists, to create a prototype for their new Aloft chain, which doesn’t even exist in the real world yet. 

It’s a pretty interesting development, in a virtual space that seems to see more and more real world companies, brands and artists becoming part of it each day.  Starwood will be able to build buzz for their Aloft brand among a group of tech-savvy, fairly sophisticated potential customers, and will be able to “test drive” certain features of the hotel before having to commit them to brick and mortar.  Clearly, this goes beyond simple product placement in an online game or virtual world, to having the brand become part of the fabric of the online world itself, in a fairly unobstrusive and benign way.  One of the challenges for Starwood, and probably for Electric Artists and the Electric Sheep, will be to find ways to keep SL residents coming to the property as time goes on.  But, given the number of entertainment options flooding SL, from live music to charity events, I’m pretty sure they’ll manage to keep things interesting.

It’s Hard to be Simple

I’ve spent the better part of my “working life” this week trying to develop a presentation for a large group of folks within my company, to make them aware of the progress we’ve made in evolving our online platform.  A few years ago, I would have shown some Gantt chart slides, talked to key milestones from the project plan, and perhaps shown a demo of the product, focusing on all the different features of the product.  Sounds reasonable, maybe? 

But how many times have you sat through a presentation very similar to that…Powerpoint slides full of text and graphics, milestones that mean little or nothing to you, because you’re not directly involved in that effort, a product demo showing off features that you’ve never been exposed to before.  And did you walk out of that presentation remembering or even caring about what the speaker was talking about?

Oh, and did I mention that I only have 20 minutes to give the talk?  Is it really possible to do all of the above, in 20 minutes or less, without sounding like Alvin the Chipmunk?

Perhaps it’s old age, or perhaps all of the 37signals blog posts have started to sink in.  But as I sat looking at my draft presentation, I decided to try something different.  I decided to try and put myself in my audience’s shoes and try to figure out what THEY wanted to hear, what would resonate with them.  In a nutshell, I decided that I would try to tell a story about our product, and that I would make it SIMPLE.  Hey, I’m creative, I used to consider myself a writer, I can tell stories.

 Except, telling a story about something as dry and arcane as a information delivery product for financial services companies is…well, it’s kind of HARD!  First, I decided to come up with the basics of my story.  But I’ve been told (and am living proof) that most human beings only retain 3 or 4 key points from a presentation.  So I needed to distill the entire story of the product down to 3 or 4 points.  Obviously, this meant I had to leave things out.  It was so easy when I could just fill Powerpoint slide after Powerpoint slide with bullet points describing in great detail all of the relevant project milestones, and product features and future planned enhancements.  But leaving things out, wow!  That’s hard – trying to decide on which points are most important to the product team, but also which points are most relevant to the audience.  It took me the better part of a day to come up with 3 major points that I wanted the audience to walk away with.  I should note that the 3 points are not necessarily the points that the project team themselves would have come up with, but I’m trying to look at things from the audience’s perspective.

Then, it was time to assemble slides.  Again, pretty easy, right?  After all, I’ve got my 3 points, so now all I have to do is put an “agenda” slide together, crank out 3 slides of text that detail my points, and throw a “thank you” slide in there.  Oh, and maybe I should include that Gantt chart, too. I mean, it’s way too detailed for anyone to read, even when projected on a giant projection screen, but it will prove that the project team is really busy doing important stuff.

Well, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned in 10 years of giving presentations, it’s that the minute you put a slide full of text on the screen, nearly everyone in the audience will start reading your slide, and pay absolutely no attention to anything you’re saying.  So, now it’s time to craft some slides that will highlight what I’m saying, without distracting from it.  And again, it’s HARD (for me, anyhow).  So here I am, it’s 2 days later, and I’ve got what I THINK is a decent set of 10 slides to support my 20 minute talk.  And there are no long bullet lists of features, or Gantt charts.  I’m still not sure it’s really right yet, but I need to get it to the meeting planner by end of day tomorrow, so I don’t have much time left to make changes.  

So far, for a 20 minute presentation, I’ve spent probably 12 hours thinking about, drafting, cursing, re-drafting, cursing, and re-re-drafting my slides.  And I haven’t even begun to start practicing my talk, so I can finish comfortably in 20 minutes and look reasonably professional as I advance through the slides.  Damn, it seems like I can talk for 20 minutes in a bar standing on my head – how come it’s so hard to come up with a 20 minute presentation? 

Dude, Where’s My Summer?

Hey, seriously…I’ve got a problem.  I lost my summer.  I mean, it was here just a minute ago, and now…well, now it’s gone.  Over the weekend, my summer was in full swing.  I took the kids to the playground, I got sunburned (bad daddy, forgetting the sunscreen).  And this morning, I’m on the way to work, and I see kids waiting by the side of the road, in sweatshirts and long pants, carrying backpacks that look way too large for them.  Traffic seemed much heavier than normal, and as I came around a corner, I realized that it was because a large yellow vehicle was stopped in the middle of the road, picking up kids.  It couldn’t be time for school to start again – it couldn’t!  My summer just started!  It can’t be gone already!

Seriously, I need to find my summer again.  It can’t be over yet – anyone seen it?

The Requisite Google Post

OK, I’m far from the first to post this, and I’m certainly far from the most qualified, but I felt like I had to jump on the bandwagon and mention that Google has started down the path of offering a complete “office” suite, by bundling Gmail, Talk, Page Creator and Calendar into a single service.  I plan to apply for access to the suite, to check it out, as I’m a current user of Google Calendar, and have lusted after Gmail for months now. 

The concept of web-based office tools is one that I think has a lot of potential, although as a devotee of Excel Pivot Tables, I have yet to find a web-based spreadsheet that will let me really replace Excel on a full-time basis.  So far, I’m partial to ThinkFree Office, which manages to provide most of the common Office functions in a spreadsheet, word processor and presentation slide manager, in a nice Java app that so far, has proven to be pretty resilient.  Of course, now that I have a number of spreadsheets and slide decks captured on ThinkFree, the barriers to my moving to another tool have been raised a bit, since it will take me a bit of time to download all of my files and upload them to a new tool.  The time spent converting, might make me tend to stay put, unless a tool comes along with some serious advantages over ThinkFree.  Short of making a Pivot Table function available, I’m not sure what features might come along that would be compelling enough for me to give up ThinkFree.  But hey, I’m always open to suggestions…

Regional Airports Rock!

I had to travel on business today for a short meeting in central New Jersey, and decided to fly into Trenton-Mercer County airport, a small regional airport with one primary carrier, the venerable Pan Am Clipper Connection.  Yes, the Pan Am name is still alive!

Well, sort of alive anyhow.  Pan Am runs a handful of flights a day on small (19 passenger) Jetstream 81 turboprop planes between Portsmouth NH, Bedford MA, and Trenton NJ.  They’ll be adding flights to Elmira NY and Baltimore MD in the coming weeks.

Despite the cozy quarters on the plane, the experience was, as my 4 year-old daughter would say, “easy – pleasy -lemon squeezy”.  I flew out of Bedford’s Hanscom Field, where I parked for free in a lot that was not more than 75 yards from the front door of the terminal.  Once inside, the same gentleman checked me in, weighed my carry-on, led us to the aircraft, loaded the baggage onto the plane, and acted as ground crew to prepare the plane for takeoff.  The airport in Trenton was slightly larger than Hanscom, but not by much.  All in all, with everything that’s happened in the world of air travel over the last two weeks, today’s trip was pretty much a cakewalk, with very little of the stress and aggravation that commercial air travel has become.

It’s unfortunate that it will probably be a while before I can take advantage of Pan Am’s service again, but you can bet that if I have a choice between fighting the crowds at Boston’s Logan International Airport and flying out of Hanscom, the little guy is gonna win every time.

Gathafi / Khadafy / Qaddafy Blogs!

Via Wonkette and Hot Air, comes the news that Libya’s “Brother Leader of the Revolution”, Moammar Qaddafi, has started his own blog.  Today’s entry appears to be the text of a recent address that Qaddafi gave, and it’s a tough read in English, possibly in part due to the translation to English.  Qaddafi appears to reference the Mohammed cartoon scandal from earlier this year, and even finishes with a tribute to Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. 

It’s interesting that in the past 2 weeks, 2 leaders of Islamic countries have added their voices to the blogosphere.  Here in the US, one of the stated objectives of our “war on terror” is to “win the hearts and minds” of the Islamic world.  And yet, I’m not aware of any George Bush or Dick Cheney blog.  Maybe Don Rumsfeld should take a few minutes and have a member of his staff open a DoD blog.

Blog Manifesto

Before I start posting to this blog in earnest, I wanted to set down a few guidelines that I intend to follow as I write and manage this blog.  I’ll reserve the right to make changes to these guidelines if circumstances warrant, but only after a great deal of consideration.

• First and foremost, the views and opinion expressed here are MINE, not of either of my current employers, or of my family or friends.  If you disagree with anything I have to say, please take it up with me, not them.
• I will make every attempt to be accurate and fair in my postings.  I will do my research before posting anything of a factual nature, and if my research is shown to be wrong, I will correct my entries, and admit my mistakes.  I also expect the same of anyone who posts a comment in response to something I’ve written.
• I commit to fostering the free and open exchange of ideas on this blog, and as a result, I will leave “comments on”, and will not, as a rule, edit or delete comments from anyone.  The one exception would be if someone makes a comment which I feel crosses the line of decency, or makes a potentially libelous statement about someone else.
• As an adjunct to the guideline above, I have no intention of entering into any “flame wars” with anyone over anything posted here.  An honest, open, disagreement or debate is one thing;  a series of hostile, personal attacks is quite another.  Anyone who chooses to take the latter approach, will find their comments left unresponded, and in extreme cases, may find their comments deleted.
• I may, from time to time, make mistakes.  That is, I may post something that’s wrong, or that people find objectionable, either through my own ignorance or haste, or perhaps simply because I didn’t choose my words properly.  When that happens, I expect to be held accountable, and will do my best to rectify the situation. 
• Finally, I’m doing this primarily as an outlet for my inner voice, and as an attempt to learn more about how blogs work, and how communities are built online.  As time goes on, my goals may change, and I’ll document them, or update this manifesto.  In the meantime, I’m here to learn, and will welcome any comments or help from whomever may come across this blog.

A Blog Is Born…

My apologies for the cliched title, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere, right?  After months of reading blogs, and being exposed to new ideas and thoughts from hundreds of smart, interesting people, I’ve decided to jump into the pool myself.  I have no idea if I’ll ever be considered “smart” or “interesting”, but at a minimum, I want to use this blog as a kind of “scratch space”, to capture my thoughts and musings for myself.  At the ripe old age of 40, I’ve reached a bit of a crossroads in my life, both from a personal and professional standpoint, and I expect that the next year will bring a lot of change.  I hope to help shape that change through my thoughts on this blog, as well as chronicle those changes for posterity. 

 If that all sounds a bit vague, just wait – it will all become clear in the coming posts.  Stay tuned!