Many Lo-Fi Prototypes

I've been listening to the audiobook of 10 Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley of IDEO. He has a great insight into something I sorta knew, but had never thought about why it was so.

The basic idea is that showing just one prototype to a customer is bad. This tends to force them into a binary/reactive decision, one that is often determined more by their relationship to the creator of the prototype than to the item itself. Given multiple items to evaluate, the attention turns more to the items, and more feedback can be gathered, since it won't be perceived as direct criticism.

The telling analogy Kelley provides is that of a husband that is told by his wife that she has purchased a new dress. She then tries it and asks how it looks. Of course, it is difficult for the husband to say anything negative, because the question is really about how she looks wearing that dress. However, given multiple options to consider, the husband is actually more free to give honest feedback.

Now, it can be expensive to buy multiple dresses, or build multiple prototypes. The answer then is to use lo-fi prototypes: whether it be pictures in a magazine or crude drawings. Still, the more prototypes that are created, the less pressure there is to get it right the first time, which is a crushing force against innovation.

Having heard his brother speak at a conference in 2006, I love what IDEO are doing. If didn't need to make quite so much money, and had any confidence in my abilities, I would like to work there...just to live at that creative level every day would make me so happy.

Productive Thoughts

Scott Simpson: I love saving things to del.icio.us w/ a "toread" tag. Offloading work to the future, incredibly productive, version of myself. [link] Kind of a cool idea for using del.icio.us, especially if you use the firefox plugin. Just highlight a bit of text and then tag it. So easy. I haven't gotten as much out of the more advanced del.icio.us bookmarks plugin, but that might be because my current bookmarks are a pile of junk.

The main garbagey bit about del.icio.us is that there is no good way to manage tags with the default apps. Idea! I am going to hunt around to look for someone that has done that or start digging into the API a little bit.

I guess one of the main competitors to this stuff is Google Notebook, but I really don't enjoy using that for some reason I don't yet understand. Those little links in the search results pages are tempting thought.

del.icio.us friends

Thinking again. One of the things Steve Poland is going after is the concept of webothlike:

Basically the idea of WeBothLike.com is to connect like-minded people — people that have the same interests. You’ll go to the website and answer questions, as many as you want. The more you answer, the more profile data we have on you — and the more we can contrast you with others in our system, and match you up with them

I think rather than asking questions it would be better to try a recommendation style algorithm on your del.icio.us links, or bookmarks, etc. so that you could get a match score for how similar you are to other people. Basically you could submit all of your links and get a quick score for who else is tagging the same things as you. You could take a similar approach with OPML comparisons to find who is reading the same things as you. On the one hand, the output of this would be suggestions about what to read- and really, who doesn't have too much to read already? On the other hand, a cooler output suggested by WeBothLike would be to find people to scheme with.

Anyway, I have a feeling someone has already done this somewhere, but it's not part of the main del.icio.us application, and it probably should be.

Google Reader Reader Robot

How about a project that downloads your unread feeds from Google Reader, uses a speech synthesis program to convert them to mp3, adds the mp3s to a podcast server, which you then script to sync to your portable device? Then you can listen to all of your news on the way to work, as read by your choice of a feminine or masculine robot.

If you like that one, wait until you hear about my idea for Google Reader Printer for my poor friends that have no internet connection at their desks.

Hopefully someone else is working on a good Podcast transcriber, like Podzinger. Once there is a great speech to text solution, I can come up with a convoluted name for that.

Okay, these are lame ideas, but someone's got to pick up for that Techquila Shots guy.