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What Customers Want
(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Obvious)
(also know as ‘The empty hamburger dilemma’)
Most new products and services fail. This is a depressing reality to swallow, however I am amazed by how few people ask why this happens. Or worse still all the people who have an in-built assumption and acceptance that most new things should fail. This shouldn’t be the case.
Here is a sad graph showing total product failures.
Why all this failure? Read full post
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A Manifesto for Agile Strategy: oxymoron or innovation?
“You can talk and think about stuff for ages and ages before doing something or other. Why not just do something straight away and learn from that?”
London was basking in unexpected sunshine and Tim Malbon (aka @malbonster) and I were wolfing down some fish and chips in Soho. His off-the-cuff comment stopped me cold – chip halfway to mouth – and in one way or another I have been thinking about it ever since (it was 6 months ago!).
‘Doing over planning‘ might be the simplest way to summarise the Agile philosophy that Made by Many so fervently pursues (a great non-tech articulation of the Agile approach to web apps is Getting Real by 37 Signals).
I was further prompted by Stuart’s excellent recent post exploring some of the differences between “Agile” the philosophy and “agile” the adjective, in which he concludes:
“Two of the most interesting questions for me is how is Agile going to scale beyond a team level? And how well can it be applied to processes outside software development? At Made by Many We have made a lot of ground in Agile interaction design but there is obviously much more to do and tools to create.”
So this is the question that has been haunting me: what role can or does strategy have in an Agile world? Read full post
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The Nike+ for … sleeping
There’s a pretty cool iPhone app that I’ve been trying out for a few days nights which seems to capture the imagination of everyone I talk/Twitter/Facebook to.
It’s called Sleep Cycle and it purports to analyse and track your sleep patterns and then wake you at the optimum time in the morning (ie at the lightest sleep phase. You can check it out here (or purchase directly from iTunes for £0.59).
You set it up by placing your iPhone on the mattress (next to the pillow but not covered by it), and then the app uses the accelerometer to measure tiny movements in the mattress as you toss, turn and generally shift around.
Here’s my sleep snapshot from 3 nights ago:
I woke up feeling pretty awful, certain that it had been a bad night’s sleep, and Read full post
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A time to Twitter and a time to… not
We all know that the web is the greatest discovery engine (so far) ever conceived. And even if many of us experience an occasional overload anxiety, the array of tools to filter and manage all this goodness seem to be getting better and simpler (personally I’ve replaced delicious, StumbleUpon, digg and RSS/feed readers with just one thing; Twitter).
There’s also little doubt that the benefits of having the world and its information at one’s fingertips are immense and mind-blowing (although being able to resolve office/pub/dinner party discussions with the “why don’t we Google it?” seems to be a bit of a fun-killer). And I’m certainly no ’serendipitard’ who believes that a surplus of information and algorithms are killing serendipity (as this recent debate so entertainingly raged).
And yet, even with so much being gained, halfway through last year I begun to sense that I was losing something as well.
In between Twittering on the bus into work, catching up on blogs and news at lunch, as well as playing a range of insanely addictive iPhone games (Drawrace, Flight Control etc), I realised that I had sacrificed something. In a word; downtime.
I had reached the point where I had filled up all the ‘dead time’ in my life with brilliant, stimulatory and fascinating snippets of goodness delivered to me in real-time by mind-blowingly powerful mobile digital devices and applications.
Obviously this approach (of my making) wasn’t all bad. But the potential folly of such fundamentalism was driven home to me shortly thereafter when I was wrestling with a particular thorny client problem. The breakthrough came to me in a flash of inspiration… while I was in the shower.
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Spot the difference: mobile phone websites
Browsing a range of mobile phone websites, I was struck by the incredible similarities of the way different phones are showcased.
Yes there are microsites and flash animations and loads of 360 degree spinning devices, but at their heart, they look the same.
How did we get to this? And what does it truly take – not just to look different – but to be different?
Love to get your thoughts and ideas.
Spot the differenceView more presentations from madebymany. -
Data viz talk sparks passionate debate (and a manifesto)
We already knew that people were passionate about data visualization, but the interest and debate sparked by Manuel Lima's recent talk at Made By Many has been quite something.For starters, we were almost twice oversubscribed for the talk and only just managed to squeeze everyone into the room (thanks to BBH London for hosting us).
Manuel provided a fascinating ‘deep dive into data visualization’ covering its academic beginnings, his experiences curating VisualComplexity.com and what he believes is needed for this discipline to blossom in the future.
However it was the Q&A and subsequent blog posts that showed how this topic can arouse quite passionate responses.
For anyone who missed out, here’s a 34 minute video of the talk (well, mainly a video of the screen with Manuel’s voiceover!).
MxM talk: Manuel Lima on data visualization from Made By Many on Vimeo.
(Or if you want a detailed write-up of the talk, head over to @joeadamfry’s excellent post here)
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New Made by Many Event: Manuel Lima – A deep dive into data visualization
The power and beauty of data visualization is something that the crew at Made By Many always get excited about.
Making previously ‘invisible’ information visible, not to mention aesthetically stunning, is a fascinating and rapidly growing field.
So I’m super-delighted to let you know that Manuel Lima, all-round dataviz guru, curator of the brilliant Visual Complexity blog, and recent TED speaker, will be speaking in London at BBH’s offices next Tuesday 25 August between 3.30-4.30pm.
Manuel will be re-presenting his TED talk on understanding complex interconnectedness and highlights from a range of fascinating information visualization projects. There will also be a chance for audience discussion and Q&A after the presentation.
There are very limited public seats available at this (free) event. To register your interest in attending, send your name and email address to justin AT madebymany.co.uk.
Here’s a map of the location. We’ll be starting right on 3.30pm so please get there a few minutes early.
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