Keith Instone

Check out the July 22nd BusinessWeek: Innovation of the Week podcast:

• R&D: The D Is for Design. "How research and development must change. Monty Montague, a principal at innovation consultancy Bolt, discusses how incorporating design into traditional R and D departments has led to major innovations at companies ranging from IBM to Herman Miller."

The basic question: "What is the relationship between research and innovation?" A few overall notes:

• Innovation defined as "invention that gets out in the world" (debatable: "and provides value")
• Do demand-driven research, not supply-driven (e.g., "outside-in" not "inside-out" which is the more traditional way)
• Colt 45s and individualized blender examples
• Key is "making connections" with the outside (customers, users, other industries)
• The "D" is becoming more than just "development", including "design" (and design thinking)
• Product, service and process innovation (not just products)

At about 6 and a half minutes into the interview. Monty starts talking about IBM. I may have transcribed some of the words wrong, but here is the basic quote:

Total user experience is how IBM has, not only through research and through revamping of their business model, developed innovative products, but they are innovating the user experience. And that is part of what R&D needs to do today. It needs to not consider itself a "product R&D group," but an "experience R&D group." And look at not only the development of the product, but the development of the user guide for the product, the service center for the product, the call center, the people calling to get information about the product, the selling environment in which the product is sold. All of those are touchpoints for the consumer that are as important as the product and the R&D team can be the facilitator of the innovation around all of those. And IBM has done that.

He does not mention specific examples or sources, but it is a very nice thing to say about IBM.

Since Monty seems like such a smart guy, I did a little searching for other things he has written. I only found a few:

• Integrating the Product + Brand Experience, Design Management Journal / Review, 1999
• Recognize innovative possibilities, Charlotte Business Journal, July 25, 2008

With the US presidential election coming up, ballot design is starting to get some attention again. My local paper printed "Ballot design, new machines, instructions recipe for lost votes" (by Andrew Stengel and Lawrence Norden, but I cannot find the article online) in the Opinion section earlier this week. The article seems to have been triggered by a Brennan Center press release. The main point of the article is that there is now data about the number of "lost votes" (votes thrown away because of errors) that points to usability problems. That is, ballots that violate basic design principles cause more lost votes.

One of the recommendations for government officials is "Make necessary changes based on usability testing and public sample feedback". Cool!

That reminded me to check up on the Usability Professionals' Association Voting and Usability project. It had been a while since I took notice of the great work going on there. Something new appears to be the Local Election Officials testing kit.

So if you are a local elections official who has read the Toledo Blade article and you want to do some usability testing, check out the LEO testing kit. Also, if you need to hire help doing the usability testing, UPA has a list of usability consultants in Ohio. And then there is Better Ballots from the Brennan Center - and Whitney Quesenbery, a dear colleague. Ohio ballots and Ohio laws that impede usability are included.

(What I also found interesting is that most of the people who started the LEO kit are from right around here. Not from Ohio, but just up north: MSU Usability and Accessibility Center, University of Michigan and several Michigan companies.)

I am no expert in ballot design, but if you are a local election official who needs help understanding how to do usability testing on ballots, contact me and I will be more than happy to help you get started.

I do not have final details, but wanted to get the word out as soon as possible so you can start planning. Subject to change.

Who: Scott McCloud, Cartoonist and Theorist
What: Comics: A Medium in Transition
When: Friday, October 24, 2008, 6:30 pm
Where: 206 Bowen-Thompson Student Union, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

One of the sponsoring organizations appears to be the BGSU student chapter of SIGGRAPH / Computer Arts Club. The School of Art may also be funding part of this (Todd Childers is the one who gave me the basic info - thanks Todd!).

Poking around some more, I found "The Comic Book in Popular Culture" scheduled in many rooms in the same building at the same time. Which led me to this call for participation from the Popular Culture Department. So I assume Scott's visit is part of the conference.

And checking out "Comics: A Medium in Transition" by Scott, I see these other performances:

• Dartmouth in 2006
• SIGGRAPH last year
• FlashForward in a few weeks

Stay tuned for more info...

The ibm.com US home page has a feature on Service Science this week.

(In the past, I have written about service innovation, frontiers in service and service science in politics.)

The main angle for this IBM feature on Service Science, Management and Engineering seems to be "it is the next computer science" (not unlike web science).

A few quotes:

• IBM helped create "computer science" as a field of study... IBM is again at the forefront of the next major trend in college and professional education...
• We already live in a world full of service systems, with access to more and more every day. Computer science was studying something that was very rare in the world—digital computers... (Jim Spohrer)
• Traditional courses do not integrate across discipline boundaries...It will be very important that graduates understand that an SSME focus will lead to good jobs and careers... (Lynne Rosansky)
• It provides for an integrated framework to explore all disciplines, especially computer science and information technology... (Mohammed Ghriga)
• ...a group of full professors starts to teach and research SSME, then they get from their faculty a recognition of their discipline, then the ministry of universities recognizes the discipline and then it is possible to get new full professors... (Guido M. Rey)
• ...the emerging model for software engineering is to offer an ongoing service as opposed to a tangible product acquired through a one-time sale. (Aaron Quirk)

One of the items of additional reading is the Succeeding through Service Innovation white paper, which I had the pleasure of giving feedback on. I commented on various aspects of user experience that seemed to be missing. They did use one of my quotes about the relevance to business.

I think we still have a long way to go to get the next generation ready to fix all of the messes we are going to leave them, but inter-disciplinary approaches like SSME are a step in the right direction.

Randy Pausch died yesterday. His pages at CMU (such as his update page) have been hard to access because of the traffic, so let me summarize in case you still cannot get to them.

July 25th, 2008: Randy died this morning of complications from pancreatic cancer.

July 24th, 2008: The cancer is progressing. A biopsy last week revealed that the cancer has progresed further than we had thought from recent PETscans. Since last week, Randy has also taken a step down and is much sicker than he had been. He's now enrolled in hospice. He's no longer able to post here so I'm a friend posting on his behalf because we know that many folks are watching this space for updates.

I personally found the CMU article An Enduring Legacy the best single thing to read if you are not familiar with Randy's life. Let me extract one paragraph:

He is survived by his wife, Jai, and three children: Chloe, Dylan and Logan. The family requests that donations on his behalf be directed to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, 2141 Rosecrans Ave., Suite 7000, El Segundo, CA 90245, or to Carnegie Mellon's Randy Pausch Memorial Fund, which the university will use primarily to support continued work on the Alice project.

Donating money is one way to show you care. In this case, "living life the Randy Pausch way" is also a pretty nice thing to do.

Over time, I know we will see some very fitting tributes to Randy from his professional colleagues. So far I have seen:

• Whitney Hess, one of his students
• David Armano, who has already folded one of Randy's stories into his user experience presentations

Last week, I submitted the first draft of an article to interactions about the Randy Pausch story. It was by far the hardest thing I had ever tried to write. I cannot tell yet if the next draft will be easier or harder.