Sure enough, when I got my iPad last week this quickly emerged as a pain point.

Apple decided in its noble quest for simplicity that the file system should be kept invisible.  Simple, right?  Just don’t worry your pretty little head about it.

It’s a great idea until you actually need to transfer files.  Then it amounts to a really bad idea.

What happens is that each file transfer and remote document viewing app (Air Sharing, GoodReader, DropBox, iBooks, Stanza, etc.) has no choice but to reinvent its own UI for transferring and managing files.  The resulting user experience is massively inconsistent.

And, all of these buckets of files are siloed.  No app can see see another’s contents.  The user is left having to remember what PDF is accessible from which app.

The iOS (was iPhone OS) needs to expose the file system to people who need it.  There should be a clear, obvious way of transferring files among the devices.

Here is the demo I’d like to see some day:  The iPad or iPod “desktops” show up as an extension of the PC’s desktop.   The user drags a file or folder from the PC to the iPad’s “desktop”.  Yes, the mouse cursor extends off your screen and onto the iPad* (*there’s already an app for this).  Boom… file transferred and accessible to all apps.

For bonus points: let the user indicate that changes to the files or folders should be kept in sync across all media.

The ingredients are all in place.  And yet I still haven’t seen a strong play to command our smartphones by voice.  It should be easy pickin’s at this point, nay?

But increasingly I found myself depending on these tools.  Why?  Because of the new paradigm of collaboration that they enable.  No longer must you sit in a cave and perfect a document before tossing over the wall.  In the new era, you don’t have to wait for a document to be finished to get feedback on it; multiple people can collaborate on it simultaneously, and everyone always has the latest version at all times.  It’s a better way to work.

But we are still stuck with that clunky browser-based user experience, that is now 12 years old and not much better than it was two years ago.  It’s usable, yes, but let’s be clear: Google Spreadsheets cannot hold a candle to Excel in the tightness of the user experience.

So when Microsoft announced over a year ago that it was going to match Google Apps I thought, that’s kind of nice.  The documents will be accessible from any web browser, and Google could use some competition.

But why are they racing to give up their evolved user experience?  It really is a pain to use web apps within a web browser; there are countless little user experience compromises that we must still live with.  Why must we have either cloud-hosted documents or a modern user experience?

After all, it’s not the web browser that makes web apps special.  It’s the fact that the apps and data are available everywhere and are shared in real time.

Vision to steal: Why doesn’t Microsoft let you browse, open and edit cloud-stored documents directly from within Office apps?  Users would have the best of both worlds: ubiquitous access (even from a web browser when needed), continuous publishing, and the most comfortable and responsive UI.

If you and I are co-editing a document, we’d see each others edits in Word or Excel or PowerPoint in real time (as in Google Wave).  This is not just a parlor trick; it’s a fantastic way to work collaboratively over distance while on speakerphone.  (We can expect to see much more of this.)

As a bonus idea to steal, cloud-hosted documents can be kept in sync with local copies (which is what Google Gears does).  Opening a desktop .DOC or .XLS that you have shared on the cloud would keep all edits synched to both places whenever possible.  The user could do offline editing and have the changes propagated when their Internet access is restored.

If the competition is zigging, you should be zagging, because by the time you catch up to where the competition is today, they will be somewhere else.  Don’t make it easy for customers to continue to pick the leader.  Add some enticing benefits that catch the customer’s attention and make them make a choice.  Then, over time, fill in the parts where you are behind.

That “cloud” is actually made up of racks and racks of servers. Those servers are not actually in the clouds, where it is quite cold, but down on the earth, where it’s warm and getting warmer.  Those racks of servers generate heaps of thermal energy, which requires yet more energy to keep cool.  Otherwise they melt onto one another like Hersheys in the glovebox.

The software architecture that makes these clouds of servers work is modular, and fault-tolerant and distributed.  They allow plug-and-play expansion when more capacity is needed.  They are built to withstand any node failing (with thousands of servers, several will break down every day).

And those nodes can be anywhere, since everything is connected.  But given a choice, it’s preferable to put them close to where they are needed, because things are faster that way.

The purpose of a space heater is to generate heat.  Heaters are pretty dumb.  That’s all they do.  They have an electric heating element, maybe some oil to circulate through and some fins to radiate the heat, a thermostat and that’s it.

What if a space heater instead had a bunch of cheap, older generation, heat-generating CPUs and a wireless connection?  You could crank up the number of processors and their clock speed for a nice cozy hearth, or turn them down a few GHz if you just needed to keep your nose from freezing overnight.

The cloud computing companies could even give you a few cents for each MIPS-hour your heater burns.

At a larger scale, an entire office floor could have computers built into its HVAC system.  Even our desktop computers could be enlisted for the job.  They are ridiculously overpowered for what we need them for most of the time anyway.  The building’s climate control system could instruct all those idle CPUs to do something productive with their downtime, while warming the office in the winter.  Those computers could even monitor the local temperature and provide more heat where it is most needed.

All of this would:

• do something productive in the process of heating your home or office
• reduce the cost of cooling servers
• distribute computing closer to where it is needed
• maybe control temperature in a breezy office to a finer degree
• maybe subsidize heating costs by donating cycles to the cloud

My wife, tactfully: “I think you have an idea that is ahead of its time.”

Yes, it could be a while before this idea is stolen.  [This would be a fun and compelling research project for some engineering & system design students.  Anyone?]

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, an innovation consultancy that helps guide product leaders and their teams to generate ideas even more important than the Network Heater.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

With a high contrast scene like a face against a bright daytime sky, you have to choose between detail in the shadows — your friend’s face — and highlights in the bright areas — like the cool billowy clouds.  [..] Is there anything to stop the camera from capturing multiple exposures and doing this stitching for you within the camera?  Then you could have Ansel Adams shots at the touch of a button

A team at Stanford has demonstrated this feature (see the video halfway down the page).

Plus those idea robbers also stole another idea straight from my head: the ability to program the camera for all kinds of tricks.

However, their model is open-source software, and so it will be limited in use to real programmers.  This is nice, but I want Nikon and Canon to let any computer-literate person write – or visually snap together – scripts to be executed by the camera. (That’s the new idea to steal.)

This is an enabling technology that would let the end-user do all kinds of tricks:

• Adjust settings & preferences according to your rules (If it’s in Manual mode, fix the ISO.  If it’s in Aperture priority mode, use Auto-ISO.  If the flash is on, drop ISO to 100.)
• Set up a lightpainting program: blink the light for 3 seconds to indicate the start of the program, then open the shutter for 60 seconds while you paint, then beep for 5 seconds so you can pose, then take a flash image to capture you.
• Baby or lightning capture: With the camera on a tripod pre-bufferring video, and when a spike in lighting happens or the baby finally laughs, let the user press the remote to begin capture a few seconds earlier
• Wildlife capture: Pre-buffer video, and when motion is detected, start recording it from a second earlier.  Then capture stills every 10 seconds for the next minute, then wait for motion
• so much more

The scripts would be sharable and rated online among the community.  Serious photographers are a techie, enthusiastic bunch and this creative capability would go over nicely.

Photographers, what tricks would you teach your gear if it were easy and fun?

A big ongoing question is whether it will be possible for newspapers to stay afloat by charging for its content.  I happen to think it is possible, especially for those few papers with original, high quality, highly differentiated content.

But my point in this article is not to argue that it would work, but instead to stick my neck out and take a stab at the question of, if requiring payment were attempted, how such a system should be crafted.  My fear, and expectation, is that when paid online newspapers are introduced again, it will once again be done clumsily and greedily, and will foster user rebellion and further decline of journalism.

So here is a blueprint for another way.

Precedents

The system I propose rests upon elements of several precedents which provide proofs of concept:

• SMS messages - Each message is too cheap for the customer to think about (although in the aggregate, the price is enormous).  There is no purchase confirmation; it just happens.  Consumption is separated from payment, which happens at the end of the month.   (Someone tell me again that micropayments won’t work?)
• Ringtones – even at $1 or $2 it was cheap enough to be a no-brainer for status-conscious kids.  The purchase was also separated from billing.
• Electronic toll collection systems such as FasTrak or EZ-Pass.   I had read that bridge tolls increase far faster than otherwise when electronic payment is implemented (I can’t find the reference.  Anyone?).  It’s is a lot easier to cross the bridge without having to feel the pain of handing over a fiver each time.
• Apple’s iTunes Music Store - Anyone can download any song online for free from file sharing networks.  Yet lots of people pay to get it from iTunes Music Store.  Why?  It always boils down to their needs.  The iTunes store addresses the need for convenience (speed and streamlined purchase workflow), the need for audio quality (random downloads vary in quality), and the need for a clear conscious.  There is a market for legal.
• Apple’s iPhone app store - iPhone apps are so cheap that it’s almost a no-brainer to just buy them.  And you can buy them right from the phone, greatly reducing the purchase friction.  Estimated sales?  $2.5 billion per year.
• Skype - You only have to pitch in $10 occasionally.  The amount trickles down slowly as you call your distant relatives.  (Tell me again how micropayments don’t work?)
• Wall Street Journal online – offers a proof of concept that differentiated content can attract paying customers.
• Nintendo Wii game store, iStockPhoto and others deal with credits rather than dollar value.  Not necessarily the customer-friendliest trick, but it allows prices to be increased while obfuscating the normal pricing calculus.
• Credit cards – You only pay at the end of the month.  Credit cards divorce the desire to acquire from the pain of paying, and that makes people much more willing to spend.
• Amazon 1-click – Radically reduces the purchase friction.  You click that button and your mind switches modes from, “Should I buy it?  Let me think about it.” to “I bought it, now let me think about how to justify my actions.”

Elements of all these systems can be incorporated into our architecture for moving people to a paid model for newspaper articles.

Incidentally, I think it’s silly for people to make blanket statements that micropayments can never work or that people will never pay for online content.  Micropayments are nothing more than small payments.  Anyone buying a gumball out of a machine is making a micropayment.  That said, to make it work the content has to be valuable enough to be worth buying, differentiated enough to prevent migration to lower-cost competitors, cheap enough to not think about, and the payment mechanisms has to be streamlined enough that it does not impose its own burden of inconvenience.

Overall strategy

The solution requires some systems thinking to account for the psychology of visitors.  There is some social engineering going on here but I hope you don’t construe it as evil.  Society needs strong journalism and we’ve had a free ride for many years.  Those doing a good job of journalism deserve to be compensated well and we have to find a way to get from here (unsustainably free) to there (sustainably profitable).

The strategy involves these elements, which have been notably absent in prior attempts:

• Position ourselves to be on the consumer’s side.
• Overcome the barrier of having the customer pull out that credit card for the first time
• Boil the frog.  (Yes I know frogs don’t really allow themselves to be boiled slowly.)  Start the user off with plenty more free content, then make it so cheap they don’t care.  Give time for people to get used to the idea that there is no more free lunch, but make lunch extremely cheap.  Then ratchet up the price gradually profitability slowly as
• Make the transfer of money and credits as frictionless as possible.
• Separate the act of consuming from the act of exchanging money.  Avoid having people make purchase decisions.
• Plan to lose money for a while, as you transition the audience to a paid basis.  Getting greedy and trying to make a huge profit immediately will just leave you wondering why the frogs just keep jumping out of the water.

The system would work something like this:

1. Preparation

• Make it clear to visitors in advance that access to certain content will soon require credits.  Not because you’re greedy or mean, because  you can no longer survive without it, which is true.  The point is to combat the first instinct of critics that anyone who tries to charge for something is evil.
• Start as soon as possible, to space out the future price increases as far as possible.

2. Pricing and sign up

• Use credits as currency for accessing content, not cash.
• Do not expire credits (like some services we know)
• Give unlimited access to nonprofits and educational institutions, for good will.
• Give away a large number of free credits to anyone who wishes to continue reading the site.  Give enough free credits for 6 months of typical usage and convey clearly that this is the case.  The point is to soften the discomfort at transitioning to metered access.  Users may initially think, “This stinks!  I don’t want to pay!  But whatever, just give me the article I want to read; I can opt out later when my free credits expire.”  But as they use the site over time they will incubate in the thought that the content is actually worth something and think, “Well it’s not that much and fair is fair.”
• When the user signs up, require a valid credit card, PayPal account or direct withdrawal.  Don’t charge anything at this time; instead, deposit a few cents in the account.  The point is to disconnect the act of giving the credit card information from any purchase decision.  Getting over this hump is a major strategic turn.
• Give the user the choice of how much the auto-bill amount should be when the user runs out of credits.  $5, $10 or $20.  The point is to give the customer some level of control so they don’t feel like helpless victims.
• Make the initial price for reading an article so low, few will care:  2 credit per article, with one credit worth roughly one penny.
• Keep the price structure extraordinarily simple.  Make all the content deduct a single credit.  Don’t charge different amounts for different length articles or different “premium” articles.  Don’t make some content free and some paid.   Your goal is to avoid having people ever snap into purchase decision mode.
• Make the cost of credits an odd ratio, such as 1000 credits for $9.50.  This will be increased over time.
• Continue to serve ads and, of course, collect revenue for them.
• Allow for an ad-free version of the experience, for, say, 3 credits per article, whatever recoups the lost revenue.  Indicate in the box in the corner that this price level is activated.
• If you detect that ad blockers are being used, then, after a generous grace period, let the user know that they will be automatically switched to the ad-free experience in a few days.  Give instructions on how to disable their ad blocker if they would prefer otherwise.
• Offer unmetered access to the site for $50 a year.
• Be fair, and when the user hits the annual subscription amount, automatically upgrade them to unmetered access and let them know.  You could bilk them as, say, cellphone carriers and banks do, but remember, you want customers to see you as the good guys to lower their resistance to paying you.

3. Reading / purchasing experience

• Show the meter of credits remaining in a box at the top-right corner at all times.
• Indicate within that box the price of each article: 1 credit per article.
• When the user clicks a link for an article, just deduct the credit.  Don’t request confirmation.  Put a small note in the box in the corner saying that a credit was deducted for this article.
• The price is for unlimited use of that article.  Don’t charge them multiple times for re-reading an article they already bought.  Remember:  you’re on their side.
• Let the user click an undo button if they didn’t want the content.  Don’t haggle; give the customer ample benefit of the doubt.  Maybe they clicked by accident, maybe they didn’t get what they expected, or maybe they don’t like the writing.  Have a money back guarantee and just credit the content back.  Say something only if you notice the right being abused.
• When the user has 25 credits left, put up a note saying that their account will be auto-billed for $5 or $10 or $20 worth of credits once their account falls to 10 credits.

4. Dealing with piracy

• Take a soft stance on the inevitable content piracy that will ensue.  Focus on the mainstream users who are willing and able to pay and who don’t have the inclination to bother with the workarounds.  The main site will always be faster, more cohesive and more convenient than the rip-off sites and thus differentiated.
• Be gentle with content pirates; they will all blog your cease-and-desist letters.  Go after the worst offenders.  Say, sorry, we wish we could give away the content for free.  But we are forced to prosecute copyright violators otherwise we lose the copyrights.
• Over time gradually increase the exchange rate of credits per dollar and/or the number of credits to read an article.  If you devalue existing credits (e.g. by doubling the cost of reading an article from 1 to 2 credits) then be fair and make existing credit balances whole (e.g. by doubling the number of old credits).

5. Bonus points

• The hard part:  Establish a consortium of content providers.  Newspaper creators, TV vendors, eBook vendors, bloggers, etc. that all will run on the same system and display the price in the same way.  Signing up for any one service signs someone up for all of them.  The point is to reduce the sign-up pain.  The less the user has to whip out the credit card, the better.  This may be the only chance that the smaller players have.
• Different types of content may cost a different number of credits.  Use as a basis the amount of time the content keeps the user occupied.  If an average article takes 5 minutes to read and costs 1 credit, make a 25 minute TV show 5 credits.

No matter what, the newspaper business will contract.  There are just too many papers out there relying on syndicated (read: commodity) content, that have too little to offer.  But for the top papers ready to try again to charge for content, they should follow an approach like this that accounts for buyer psychology.

Readers, what did I miss?  Please pass this article on to people who might benefit from it.

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

There were two main options. If you give mobile surfers the whole site (Option 1), it will be slow, and it will be poorly formatted to the small screen.  If you reformat the websites to make them fast to load and easy to read (Option 2), you lose the authenticity of surfing the real world.

The iPhone took a clear stance in favor of the former alternative.  They download and display the whole website quite accurately.  They were able to pull this off (years after the Palm initiative) because of important technical advancements: higher res screens that allowed small text to be legible, a scalable graphics and text rendering layer that allows pages to be zoomed to any level of magnification, and 3G & WiFi networking that made loading the full, original web page directly, without a transcoding proxy, tolerable.

And this works.  Sorta.  Apple’s early iPhone ads featured someone pinch-zooming into an article blurb on the New York Times home page.  Well, this just so happens to be a narrow newspaper-like column of text that actually lends itself to reading on the small display of a mobile phone.

Most prose on the web is not so narrow.  In real life, reading a web page as originally formatted involves a lot of laborious pinching and scrolling, both horizontal and vertical.  It’s so laborious that I have found it simply too much work to read articles this way on my iPhone.

Instead, I channel all of my iPhone articles through an app that caches and reformats it for the small screen. (I happen to use Instapaper, which I have found edges out its close competitor, Read It Later.)  It’s a great solution, and as a bonus, it even increases my productivity: rather than getting lost in the surf when I am at my computer supposedly working, I click the Read Later button and channel it off to my iPhone for reading during downtime.

But importantly, Instapaper reformats the web content so it’s very easy to read on the iPhone.  The text is as large as you need it to be, it syncs quickly since it cuts out the graphics, and no evil horizontal scrolling is involved.  Instapaper also has a brilliant tilt-to-scroll feature that makes scrolling feel like it’s not a task at all, just a subtle change in the angle at which you are holding the device.  This experience is a night-and-day difference from attempting to read the original web page that was designed for a computer display crammed onto a screen that fits in the hand.

The only remaining trouble is that moving everything through Instapaper is extra steps, and I am still forced to skip some content because of it.

Which brings us to today’s idea to steal:  To Apple, and anyone else who creates web browsers for mobile experiences:  it’s great that you can render a web page accurately.  Thanks, and congratulations.  But for actual readability, please provide the option to quickly load and reformat a page for the small screen.  Support both Option 1 and Option 2.

(Oh, and while you’re at it, you should pick up on what Instapaper has discovered and build in support for offline caching and reading, so it’s available to all applications.)

The strongest influence on reputation isn’t what a company says about its product, it’s what people actual experience with it.  Whether customers love or hate your offering, they are sure to tell two friends, and so on. The channels for doing so are myriad, and the message is a far more credible and influential.

And so the most powerful way for us to establish a valuable brand is by consistently creating great products.

Duh, right?

Yet take General Motors, which keeps trying to convince us through its words, not its actions, that we’ve changed, baby, we swear.

One need only rent a GM car to be reminded that this is not the case.  Each rental event is powerful negative advertisement for GM, reconfirming the “hoary old conventional wisdom” about GM’s lackluster quality.

This is not entirely GM’s fault.  We who rent cars are notoriously price-sensitive.  If rental agencies were to spring for more expensive and enjoyable cars they’d have to raise rental rates, and they’d instantly lose business to lower-cost competitors.  Rental agencies need to acquire cars as cheaply as they can to keep prices down.

But this still doesn’t solve GM’s brand problem.  What might GM do about it?  Here are some possible strategic visions for them to steal:

• Option 1. Spin off a new, separate brand and separate models for the rental market, and distance them from the GM brand.  Only permit premium vehicles to be rented under the GM badge — cars that will leave renters with a positive impression of the brand.  Forbid any sub-par car from carrying the GM nameplate.
• Option 2. Think of car rentals not as a profit center but as advertising opportunities.  Only permit GM cars to be rented that will reflect well on the brand.  Give the rental agencies a break on price to make this possible, or perhaps lease the cars to the rental agencies or buy them back after they start to show poorly.
• Option 3. Throw in the towel on the old GM brand.  It’s horribly tainted and will take a decade and a half a billion dollars to repair.  Spin up a fresh new brand for vehicles to be sold to consumers that has no “G” and no “M” anywhere.

And of course, support the brand by making nothing but world-class quality cars from now on.

Any other options?

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost

The author’s vision to steal includes:

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. [..] A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

Have grad students come down from the ivory tower and pile onto the challenges of the day. Sounds like a plan!

These are not gifts or promotions or bonuses like frequent flyer miles.  These are credits you PAY FOR.  With REAL MONEY. In exchange for future imagery to download.  They just “expire” them.

iStockPhoto calls these credits their very own currency.  And they deem it okay to just take that currency from you with nothing in return.  Imagine if all those gift cards you gave and received “expired” after a year.

Sorry for sounding redundant.  I’m incredulous.

They are already benefiting from having customers prepay: they get to hold onto your money and keep the interest.

This is so obviously sleazy and unfair. Some states already have explicit laws banning the practice.

The ethics of it should be plenty to prevent a company from employing such practices, but because we care about product vision, including business models, let’s lay out why this is such a petty, short-sighted idea:

• Most companies try and incentivize customers to spend more.  Expiring credits is a disincentive for customers to prepay for bigger chunks of credits.  The more you buy, the more you have to lose.
• Most companies understand the high cost of customer acquisition and try and keep customers loyal so they don’t stray to competitors.  Unused credit is a financial incentive to return to the service.   If I had just two dollars left in my account I’d go to back to iStockPhoto and spend another $10 to get what I want.  But now that my balance is zero, I’m free to look elsewhere.  By expiring credits, iStockPhoto frees their customers who would otherwise be locked in.
• Expiring credits turns happy customers into angry customers.  Someone wrote, “Yep, iStockPhoto stole money from me as well. They got 4 dollars from me that expired a few months ago. For that, they’ve lost a customer. Genius business model. Luckily there’s lots of competition so no worries on finding clipart.”

Some homework for the business leaders of iStockPhoto: read up on net promoter.

So here is some advice for competitors: differentiate by not expiring credits, and ridicule the ethics of those who do.

Readers: what are the best alternative stock photo providers?  How did you feel when you found out your iStockPhoto credits disappeared?

Update 8/20/09 – Here are some alternative stock photo sites:

• EveryStockPhoto – searches multiple free sites
• stock.xchng – free.  Includes search results from paid sites including iStockPhoto, our nemesis
• StockXPert – paid, credits do not expire.
• PhotoXPress – free, but limited downloads per day

[Non-recommended sites that expire credits: iStockPhoto, Fotolia, Dreamstime.]

Now we have cameras that can go back in time to take a shot that was missed and cameras that can recognize and focus in on faces, cameras that know precisely where you are, cameras that can transmit images over the air, cameras with large, sensitive sensors that they can almost see in the dark, cameras that illuminate with heat and can see in the dark, and cameras that can record video in HD.

It seems like digital photography has reached a peak.  The quality is impeccable.  Are we done with the radical breakthroughs?

Of course not, silly!  What kind of a blog do you think this is?

There is a feature I have been looking forward to that, to my knowledge, does not yet exist in a camera.  See, with a high contrast scene like a face against a bright daytime sky, you have to choose between detail in the shadows — your friend’s face — and highlights in the bright areas — like the cool billowy clouds.

HDR image (click to enlarge)

If you have the time and inclination you could take a couple of different exposures and sew them together.  This has become known as high dynamic range imaging.

But is there anything to stop the camera from capturing multiple exposures and doing this stitching for you within the camera?  Then you could have Ansel Adams shots at the touch of a button, without all the messy darkroom chemicals.

This is just one new avenue for innovation in image capture.  There are many more.  Stereoscopic point-and-clicks?  Cameras that can infer a 3D scene and automatically stitch together a 3D model?  Infrared cameras that can see in the dark?  Tiny lapel pin cameras that capture our life every few seconds?

Readers, what future digital camera innovations you foresee?

1. Getting a pile of design and product vision ideas off my chest and into into the wild.
2. Releasing useful models and techniques that I developed over the course of fifteen years designing products, that I hadn’t taken the time to publicize (like SSNiF scenarios)
3. Laying out my frameworks for conducting product vision.

The third, in particular was really sticking out.  It’s confusing having articles about big ideas like the Design Pyramid juxtaposed with paeans to toothpaste tubes and rants on how to improve the iPhone UI.

Product vision is the main focus of my writing right now.  I’ve developed and used a framework for doing it since the mid-90′s and have been threatening to write it up for years.  Colleagues have been asking for a clear place to go to find it.

And so I have decided to spin off a sister blog to this one: productvision.org.  Please have a gander, add it to your RSS newsreader and sign up for the product vision newsletter, and leave me some comments!

Excel SSNiF template

Excel is the most polished and efficient tool for brainstorming SSNiFs.  It’s fast and scales to a large number of SSNiFs.  Excel supports boldfacing of words within cells, one of my tips.  Using my favorite launcher, I can have a fresh, blank matrix ready to go in seconds.

Nothing is perfect, and a disadvantage of Excel is that it does not allow multiple paragraphs or bullet points per cell (another tip).  Excel does not make it easy to collaborate; you must send copies to multiple people and then merge the results.  I suggest starting with Excel if you don’t need to immediately collaborate with others electronically.

Excel has an AutoFilter feature that helps to organize and analyze.  AutoFilter makes menus out of each column header, from which you can sort or filter the rows of the table.  Good columns to sort and filter are: Area of the Product, Big vs. Little SSNiF, and, if you have it, Priority.  To activate AutoFilter, select the title row and choose Data -> Filter -> AutoFilter.

Download Excel templates:

• Blank Excel SSNiF template (zip)
• Excel SSNiF template with sample data (zip)-  (This document includes a few sample SSNiFs behind the design of a commuter coffee mug.)

Google Spreadsheets

The free FREE Google Spreadsheets, part of Google Docs is fantastic for online collaboration.   Multiple people can edit a shared copy on their schedule, and even simultaneously with others.  You can link to the SSNiF analysis from anywhere, which facilitates access and usage.  Google Spreadsheets scales up very well.

The downsides are: you cannot yet boldface individual words within a cell, you cannot have paragraphs per cell, weak conditional formatting, you cannot merge cells vertically (right?), the user experience is clunkier than a modern desktop-based app.

Google Spreadsheets has a very good Excel import tool, so you can start your SSNiFs off in Excel and migrate them over when it’s time to collaborate.

You can access my Google Spreadsheets SSNiF template and make a copy from there (while signed in, choose File -> Copy Spreadsheet…)

• Google Spreadsheets SSNiF analysis template

Apple Numbers

I like where Apple is going with their Pages and Numbers.  They have a number of innovations, and they certainly look sharper.  But they are not quite mature yet for prime time use.

Nevertheless, here is the template I have for their spreadsheet, Numbers:

• Apple Numbers SSNiF analysis template (zip)

Word Processors

Word processor tables give full control over formatting your SSNiF tables.  They are useful when you will be communicating a small set of finely tuned SSNiFs to someone (for example, when using Big SSNiFs as the basis of the product vision).  You can generally merge cells and make them look exactly how you want.

Downsides: they don’t scale up as well as spreadsheet table, they get clumsy when there are additional columns, it’s hard to rearrange rows,

Here’s the SSNiF table in Microsoft Word format:

• MS Word SSNiF analysis template (zip)

HTML tables

Web/HTML editors – SSNiFs look  good in HTML tables, which support wrapping, multiple paragraphs in a cell, merging and highlighting.

The problem is that formatting can be a bear and takes time and mind juice away from thinking about the SSNiFs themselves.  I only use them once I have worked out the SSNiFs elsewhere, when I have to express them on a web page.

• HTML SSNiF analysis template – (bring your own CSS)

Google Sites

Google Sites is the wiki concept evolved.  It lets you publish always-available, hyperlinked documentation that anyone can read and refine at any time.  I’ve replace most of my paper-based design documentation with it.

Google Sites’ table editing functionality is crude, but sufficient for communicating small- to medium-sized SSNiF tables (from one to about 30 SSNiFs).  It allows tables to be interspersed with regular text, as I’ve demonstrated in some previous articles.  This makes Sites great for capturing requirements using SSNiFs.  (More on SSNiFs and requirements in Part 2)

Here is a simple Google Sites page you can copy for your own use:

• Google Sites SSNiF analysis template

Good luck using these templates.  If you make worthwhile refinements or versions in other formats, please send them to me for inclusion.

Email or link to this article at: http://stealthisidea.com/articles/ssnif-templates

<< Back to beginning SSNiFs Part 1: Introduction

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Here are some pragmatic tips to help you get going, based on several years of practice.

What to put in the Stakeholder column

• Usually the stakeholder is a customer or user of the product.
• If you have personas defined, by all means use them in the Stakeholder column.
• Not all stakeholders are users or customers.  Others may include: the company creating the product, its partners, and advertisers.
• When you discover a stakeholder a unique situation, don’t feel like you have to pigeonhole them into a preconceived segmentation of users.  Add them to the stakeholder column, no matter how small and specialized the group.

What to put in the Situations column

Most of the time the situation really is, as the word suggests, a predicament of some sort that the user is in.  For example, in the domain of PDAs, the stakeholder is on the phone with someone asking about her availability tomorrow for a meeting .  That’s the situation.  She needs to be able to look up her schedule and without hesitation and without distracting from the phone call.  (As I pointed out, this is a SSNiF that the Palm has always satisfied well, but one which the iPhone fails.)

Occasionally things aren’t quite so neat.  The purpose of the Situation column is to explain why the stakeholder has the need.  Do whatever it takes to make it fulfill this mission, even if you have to interpret the word “situation” liberally.

For example, sometimes the situation is a characteristic of the stakeholder.  A physically large PDA user may have big stubby fingers, making it hard to target small buttons.  That’s the situation.  The resulting need is for a UI that works with large hands. The SSNiF might be resolved with various potential features: larger physical buttons, larger on-screen buttons or even a voice-driven UI that minimizes button presses to begin with.

Sometimes the situation could also be an observation about the state of the world.  In the PDA world, the situation could be the reality that reasonable-sized batteries don’t last long with 3G technology.  The need for someone on the go is for extended battery life.

Just remember the rule that the SSNiF ought to capture the reason why the stakeholder has the need, and that the situation column is the place to put it.

What to put in the Needs column

The need is a very important column, because it is where you get to clearly articulate the problem, separate from the solution.  Sometimes this is the first time that anyone has attempted to do so, and it can take some thought to get right.  But doing so makes you smarter and better looking.

Deconstructing familiar, assumed features into needs sets you up for coups of innovation.  With both need and feature in front of your face, you can ask yourself, “is this solution really the best way we can think of to address this need?”  You’ll often discover a better way.  This is one of the thought patterns to get used to if you are trying to fundamentally rethink how a problem has been solved for years, as Apple has so often done.

In Jeopardy you have to phrase the answer in the form of a question.  With SSNiFs, you should get into the habit of phrasing the need as completions of the phrase: “The stakeholder has a need for…” or “a need to…”

Thus in the example above, I didn’t say that people on the go “bigger batteries,” I said their need is for” extended battery life.”  Whether this is solved by bigger batteries, or better battery chemistry, or replaceable battery packs, or a hand-crank charger is not for the needs column.  These are all potential features that may resolve the need.

Procedural tips

When you get started on analyzing a problem or modeling your assumptions about customers, do the SSNiFs in two passes.  First, brainstorm the SSNiFs as quickly as you can, filling in just one or two cells per SSNiF:

• Drop new customer groups into the Stakeholder column.
• Drop use cases, edge cases or error cases into the Situation column
• If you identify a problem that someone has, put it in the Need column.
• Drop feature ideas that pop into your head into the (potential) Feature column

When you get stuck on a SSNiF, don’t dwell.  Leave a note and move on.

When you have captured most of the SSNiFs you can think of, do another pass to connect the dots:

• For the customer groups you identified, ask yourself what distinct situations they find themselves in.
• For the situations you identified, try and articulate what precise needs fall out of them.
• For the needs you identified, try taking a stab at what types of features might resolve the need. Doing so gets the juices flowing on coming up with a solution, and deflates the tension of having known, unresolved problems linger for a long time.
• If you started the SSNiF with the feature idea, you have a puzzle to solve, of figuring out exactly what need it satisfies, for whom, and in what situation.  Sometimes I need to sleep on it to get this clarity.   In the meantime, I’ll put a tentative answer in each column, with a “(?)” to remind myself and anyone who reads it that this is a tentative answer.

Capture a superset of what you intend to do.  It doesn’t hurt, and it gives context to what you are more likely to do.  You can annotate scenarios that are explicitly off the table with the reasons they are rejected.

If you are in a research phase, don’t knock yourself out trying to come up with a potential feature to resolve each need.  Your focus at this point is on modeling reality, not designing a solution.  Only drop in potential feature ideas if a customer mentions it or a competitor has it or a solution pops into your head.

I’ve conducted customer interviews and observation sessions taking notes directly into the cells of a SSNiF matrix.  After the session I will go back and fill in the adjacent cells.

Refine your SSNiFs whenever you return to them.   When you return to your SSNiFs your mind will think of cases you missed or clearer ways to articulate the problem.  Get into the spirit of continually refining your SSNiFs.  When it’s time for you or someone else to pick up the ball, there is an evolved starting point.

Be brutally honest. Maybe there is a time for deliberately looking at the world with rose-colored glasses.  But the time you are trying to understand and model reality is not one of them.  SSNiFs are an analysis technique and if they aren’t challenging assumptions, something is probably going wrong.  If you notice that SSNiFs are being contrived to shoehorn a preconceived solution, break the glass and sound the alarm.

Ancillary columns in the SSNiF table

Depending on how the SSNiFs will be used, I add additional columns to the matrix, above the core S, S, N and F:

• Big vs. little SSNiFs – whether the SSNiF capture the reason the product or feature exists, or a specific detail?  (See Part 1)
• Notes – Capture anything relevant that you didn’t get to express within the SSNiF itself
• Area of the product -  You can put keyword in this column corresponding to feature areas like, “Security/Privacy” or “Home page” or “Preferences”.  Later you can sort this column to group related SSNiFs.
• Serial number of the SSNiF, so they can be referenced in other documentation.  (I like to number them S1, S2, etc.)
• Reviewer Feedback – I have had SSNiF matrices with 3-4 feedback columns, one for each reviewers.  This lets everyone see where everyone else is coming from and build on what other say.  Once the feedback is processed the columns can be eliminated.
• Priority – SSNiFs make wonderful feature requirements (as described in part 2).  You can columns to support the feature rating scheme you use.  (I’ll cover SSNiF priorities in a different article.)  During the Vision phase you will sift through the SSNiFs and pick out which ones to pursue.
• To be researched – It’s a great idea to do a SSNiF analysis even before you go out in the field.  When holes or controversies are discovered, they can be dropped into the “to be researched” column.

Tactical tips

• Sometimes there are clusters of SSNiFs all describing the same customer or resolving the same need with different features.  It can be convenient to put multiple related situations, needs or features in a single cell, rather than having a separate row for each.
• Boldface the operative words in each SSNiF, to make it easy for someone to skim the matrix or search for a SSNiF.  The operative words might point out a non-obvious stakeholder, a unique situation, a need that had been under-appreciated, or a nifty feature. (You can do this in Excel and word processors, but not yet with Google Spreadsheets.)
• In Excel, you can use conditional formatting in Excel, to automatically highlight Big SSNiFs, making them jump out of the pack of little SSNiFs (thanks to product designer Josh Hall for this tip).
• Use Excel’s AutoFilter feature (Choose: Data -> Filter -> Autofilter) that lets you reduce distractions of a long SSNiF list and zero in on one feature area at a time.
• Sometimes a cluster of distinct SSNiFs will share the same stakeholder or situation or need.  If you have a small, polished set of SSNiFs to publish, it’s polite to merge clusters of identical cells.  It makes the table easier to read as you can see in these examples.  However when you are in heavy analysis mode with your sleeves rolled up don’t bother merging.  Spreadsheets become brittle and inflexible with lots of merged cells and you end up spending too much time futzing with formatting.

Please give SSNiFs a try, feel free to bend it to suit your needs, and let me know if you have any questions or observations about the process.

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

In the Introductory article I described Big and little SSNiFs, showed a couple of examples, and laid out the benefits of capturing scenarios in terms of Stakeholders, Situations, Needs and (potential) Features. Here I’ll  talk about how they fit into the product creation process.

SSNiFs have a role to play in the four major stages of designing things:  1. understanding your customers  2. formulating a vision, 3. generating requirements and 4. solving the design itself.  Not coincidentally, these correspond to the four layers of the Design Pyramid.  Let’s dive into each layer.

SSNiFs at the Understanding layer

To properly solve problems for people, we must first understand them.  We gain this understanding by conducting customer interviews, observing them in their natural habitats, and trying their jobs out for ourselves.

The findings of this research are typically communicated as reports or presentations.  Here, problems arise.  The presentations are usually fascinating but there can be a gap between each learning and what we are supposed to do with it.  If the client cannot see a path for turning insight into action the research will languish.

To make research findings more digestible, it helps to cook them a bit.  The most useful findings are scenarios that no-one anticipated, resulting in needs that are unmet.  Expressing each scenario as a SSNiF packages it into a self-contained, bite-size story.  Each one represents a discrete customer problem that we can consider addressing in the product.

The SSNiF format invites the researcher to take a stab at capturing the potential Feature that resolves the Need.  While it is not expected to be the final word on the subject, it has the effect of letting everyone see how the raw insights connect to enhancements to the product, and getting the juices flowing.

Now’s a good time for me to make a subtle point the Design Pyramid.  See that little cylinder sticking out the top?  No, it’s not a cake topper.  It’s actually a peg of the Understanding level that threads through the layers, like the baby’s plastic ring toy you might have seen.  The message of this metaphor is that understanding touches each level of the Pyramid, and holds the whole thing together.

Likewise, the SSNiF scenarios that we discover at the Understanding level bubble up through the Vision, Requirements and Design stages.

SSNiFs at the Vision layer

During the discovery phase, we will generate many more SSNiFs than we can possibly address.  Our mission at the Vision level is to sift through and select a cohesive, achievable set of Big SSNiFs to take on.  This is the problems to solve and it’s the heart of the product vision.

The vision can be communicated directly using a SSNiF table, or paraphrased as prose or bullet points.  Expressing the vision as SSNiF scenarios conceptualizes the product on the basis of customer needs.  This is the customer-centric way of doing it.  It steers everyone away from thinking about the product in the perilous terms of a technology, a set of features, or a the competition.

There are always some reasonable-sounding SSNiFs that a team will choose not to pursue.  It is helpful to explicitly list these out, along with the reasons for rejecting it.  This acknowledges the merit of rejected ideas, while helping to maintain focus by making it explicitly out of bounds.

Before proceeding to requirements and design it’s important to achieve team buy-in on the chosen SSNiFs.   The rest of the work is guided by this vision.

SSNiF at the Requirements layer

In bowling, it’s impossible to score a strike without all the pins standing.

I think of design the same way.  For our noggin to synthesize elegant, complete solutions, we have to stuff all the pins into it.

The design requirements are the pins.  Requirements aren’t anything mysterious; they are simply an expression of what the design must accomplish.  They afford us the chance to think through what we have to do before we do it.

SSNiFs are my favorite form of requirements.  They connect the need to the underlying scenario, which maintains the context.  They give the person doing the requirements (the product manager, or a slightly younger version of ourselves) a place to capture their first instinct of what the solution might be, but without being committed to it.

If we’ve done our homework at the Understanding and Vision levels, Requirements will be a piece of cake.  We can simply flesh out the Big SSNiFs already developed.  Before starting a new design, I will rapidly brainstorm dozens of little SSNiFs into Excel, filling in just one or two cells per SSNiF at first.  Use cases, edge cases and error cases are captured in the Situation column.  Newly identified user types go into the Stakeholder column.  Design ideas go into the (potential) Feature column.  I’ll then do a separate pass to flesh out the more important and less obvious SSNiFs and to determine what SSNiFs are worth covering.

Then, I’m ready to bowl. 

SSNiFs at the Design layer

At this point, we can stop looking at the SSNiFs.  They’ve been internalized, and design ideas should be bouncing around our head like popcorn.  I don’t consider myself qualified to do a design until I’ve reached this point.  It’s too easy to get excited and put pencil to paper before we’ve done our due diligence.  We end up doing a bang-up job solving the wrong problem.

Once we have a candidate design or three, it’s time to return to the SSNiF-based requirements to see if we’ve covered everything.  We walk through each SSNiF scenario and ask ourselves, “for this user, in this situation in this need, will our solution truly satisfy the need?”  This lets us catch and fix design issues on paper at the earliest, cheapest and fastest point in the process.

You can show a prototype of your design to users for feedback at any time.  If your SSNiF model is strong most of the feedback you receive will be at the Design level.  They will give rise to refinements to the details of the solution, and not fundamental challenges to which problems we should be solving.

Your understanding of the problem will be further ripened through the design phase.  It’s worth returning to the SSNiFs and touching them up, because they continue to justify your design choices and educate others on the team, and they form the basis of the next iteration of the product.

Now, enough with the meta-talk about SSNiFs.  Next, I will give some tips from the trenches for composing SSNiFs.

<< Back to SSNiFs Part 1: Introduction |  Continue to Part 3: Tips for SSNiFs >>

Email or link to this article at: http://stealthisidea.com/articles/how-ssnifs-fit-in

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

One of the best skills a designer can have is empathy with the user.  And one of the best ways to achieve empathy is by looking at things from the user’s perspective using scenarios.

Scenarios have been around a while in different forms and flavors, but I haven’t found the standard formulations entirely satisfactory.  They are either too verbose, or too unstructured, or not scalable, or they don’t articulate the underlying need or explain why the need exists to begin with.

Over time I converged on a different, simpler way of composing scenarios which I thought worth sharing. I have been using this technique since 2002.

Elements of a SSNiF Scenario

The technique is based on the observation that there is a common storyline and set of elements to all good scenarios.  There is a stakeholder, typically a user or customer or persona, in some situation.  The situation results in a need. The need is resolved by a feature, or by the product as a whole.

The first three elements, Stakeholder, Situation, and Need, express the problem.  The Feature is the solution.  Adding a gratuitous “i” to suggest a pronounciation spells SSNiF.

I like the metaphor: on a new project we need to SSNiF out the domain to make sense of it, as a dog sniffs out strange new territory.  To test whether a proposed idea is a good one, we SSNiF it out.

Big SSNiFs

SSNiFs come in two sizes, big and little.  Big SSNiFs describe the overall purpose of a product or feature.  Little SSNiFs delve into detailed use cases.  They describe why individual features exist, or aspects of the design.

Let’s look at some big SSNiFs related to the iPod.  One key group of stakeholders are those who must take public transportation on a regular basis.  The journey is long, repetitive, and boring — that is the situation.  The need that results is for something to make the idle time more enjoyable.  The iPod is the solution that addresses the need.

We can lay this scenario out in a SSNiF table.  I’ve added a few other Big SSNiFs representing other key usage scenarios of the iPod:

Some Big SSNiFs for a portable audio device

These Big SSNiFs clarify why the product is needed. In fact, the essence of a product concept can be conveyed in terms of few Big SSNiFs.  With a tight set of Big SSNiFs in hand you should have no trouble conveying to someone what problem the product will solve for customers.

Little SSNiFs

Whereas Big SSNiF are for clarifying the big picture, little SSNiFs are for working out the details. Here are some little SSNiFs of mass transit commuters:

Notice how each feature is connected back to its underlying use cases.  We could enumerate all of the features this way, tracing them to their purpose.

How SSNiFs fit into the product creation process

SSNiFs are involved at each level of the Design Pyramid.

• At the Understanding level, customers research is made more actionable by synthesizing it down to a set of big and little SSNiFs.
  
• At the Vision level, we can sift through the all the big SSNiFs we discovered, and sculpt a product vision out of the right set of Big SSNiFs.
• At the Requirements level, we can play out the Big SSNiFs into lots of little SSNiFs.  SSNiFs make wonderful requirements, as I’ll get to in a minute.
• At the Design level, we create a solution with the scenarios in mind.  We test our design by walking through the selected big and little SSNiFs from each stakeholder’s perspective, asking ourselves, “does the solution we came through truly address the SSNiF?”

If you chose important SSNiFs, and if your solution addresses them, you will have a pretty good product.

So what’s the big deal?

SSNiF scenarios have a number of benefits:

SSNiFs are relentlessly user-centric. SSNiFs force us to figure out not just what users need but why.  This emphasis on understanding why is unique to this method.  Knowing why is the test of true mastery over the user’s world.  It is what lets us interpolate and extrapolate from what customers are able to articulate to us directly.  It is a critical aptitude for visionary thinking.

The purpose behind each feature is clear at all times. Every feature is connected to the scenario it addresses.  You will appreciate this if you have encountered features in your product whose existence no-one can explain.

Real-life SSNiF table in Excel

SSNiFs distinguish stakeholders – There is a common trap of thinking of “the user” as part of a single, homogeneous bunch.  You cannot fall into this trap if you do SSNiFs, because identifying differing stakeholders is inherent in the process. SSNiFs help us stay connected to to the different worlds of different audiences.

SSNiFs are scalable enough allow you to model as many narrow user groups as you come across in the real world.  You can capture and model what you see without oversimplifying it.  This is useful because observations about obscure groups and their predicaments is grist for the idea mill.

SSNiFs give us a place to capture the hot feature ideas, but without committing to them.  No designer enjoys it when our colleagues wildly jump ahead to the feature they envisioned while taking a shower.  We’d rather have a calm conversation about what the requirements are, then work out the best possible solution from there.  Designers are always trying to get product managers to think in terms of requirements, not concrete features.

In practice though, our human brains can’t help but think in terms of the concrete.  SSNiFs offer a compromise: it gives us a slot to place our (possibly lame) initial solution as long as (a) we agree to call it the potential feature, and (b) we back-fill the other columns of the SSNiF.  The spontaneous feature idea then turns into a vehicle for getting at the scenario.  The initial solution is traced back to the problem (where the important part of the idea lies anyway), and from there we can move forward and see if we can find a better solution to the SSNiF.

Which leads to the next benefit:

SSNiFs leave the door open to a better solution – By labeling a feature as potential, we are making it clear that this is a tentative idea on how we might solve the need.  The door is open to other potential approaches.  If someone comes up with a better way to solve it, we’re happy to toss the earlier concept.  Because this is built into the process, this helps prevent us from getting too wedded to our ideas.

SSNiFs make user research more actionable – Have you ever attended a fascinating, informative research presentation that was completely forgotten by the following morning?  The problem is that the findings just are not boiled down to an actionable format.

I have found that almost all of the actionable findings from ethnographic research boil down to either SSNiFs or “key observations and their potential implications to the product” (the subject of a future article).  SSNiFs go a long way towards making user research actionable.

Anyone doing basic user research should try distilling their findings down into a prioritized table of SSNiFs.

SSNiFs provide a reality check – To fill in a SSNiF that backs a proposed feature you must ask some key questions: “What need does it solve?  For whom?  Under what circumstances?”

Merely asking these questions puts the new idea in perspective.  We’ll find that there just aren’t that many users of that type, or that the situation just doesn’t come up that often, or that when it does, the need is not terribly strong.  At this point we should take a courageous gulp and just cut the feature.  Worthwhile features will have solid answers to these questions.

Next time someone proposes a feature, try asking the three key SSNiF questions to see what is behind it.

SSNiFs are thorough – some approaches to scenarios buckle under the weight of complex-real world design problems.  They become onerous to author, review and maintain.  SSNiFs scale easily from a handful to scores or even hundreds of SSNiFs for large-scale initiatives.

Process benefits

As a process for capturing scenarios, they have more benefits:

SSNiFs are easy to understand – a SSNiF table makes sense to anyone on first reading.  Others can jump in and start contributing right away by following examples.

SSNiFs are concise – SSNiFs distill the minimum and sufficient elements of a scenario into a tabular form.  This makes it possible to categorize, prioritize, sort and filter any numbers of SSNiFs.

My preferred medium for capturing SSNiFs is the spreadsheet.  I use Excel when capturing lots of little SSNiFs just before doing a design.  I’ll even capture SSNiFs live, while conducting customer interviews, dropping new insights into any of the four columns and back-filling the other columns later.

SSNiFs work in a group process – Initial SSNiFs can be captured using a spreadsheet projected onto a screen or with a wall of sticky notes.  I also have had success with Google Spreadsheets, because it allows anyone on the team to annotate or refine the SSNiFs at any time.  (See also: Free templates for SSNiFs)

SSNiFs get everyone’s assumptions on the table – It is fascinating what comes out of a group SSNiF process. Different team members will have different insights, ideas and scenarios weightings.  SSNiFs provide a medium to capture the “best of” multiple peoples’ perspectives.  When a fundamental difference in belief about a user scenario arises, we can add it to a “to be researched” list and get to the bottom of the discrepancy later.

More examples of SSNiF Scenarios

Here are some prior articles that involve SSNiFs:

• Open, yet encrypted Wi-Fi
• Hosted vs. Local applications
• Marriage Sav-R Toothpaste Tube
• Who Read your Email this Morning?

Summary

SSNiFs are a concise way to model scenarios that emphasizes the connection between features of a product and the underlying customer scenario and need.

Please give SSNiFs a try and feel free to write me with questions or comments at: phaine at obvious design dot com.

Continue to Part 2: How SSNiFs fit into the product creation process >>

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

[6/24/09 Did editing pass based on feedback]

Here are a few possible improvements:

1. Load me up. Make streaming music playback a multimedia experience for when the music piques my interest.  It is fantastic that I can glance at Pandora on my iPhone to see a vivid album cover of the currently playing song.  But I want more more more… lyrics, photos of the performer, liner notes, trivia, upcoming concerts.

2. Sync up. If a Pandora client is playing, and another is activated with the same account, give the option to sync playback across them.  Buffer them up so they are in perfect synchrony.   This would allow multiple sound systems in the house to be synchronized.  At that point, changes to one would change them all.

3. Buddy up. List what friends are currently using Pandora, the titles of their stations and the current song.  Give the option to tune in to someone else’s station live.  Leverage existing social networks so we don’t have to re-establish the graph.

4. Step up the bitrate. I recently fired up a phonograph that had been idle for fifteen years and was blown away at the sound fidelity.   I had literally forgotten how much better music could sound.  Over the years, MP3s and streaming audio had inured me to mediocre quality of digitally compressed music.  Streaming music purveyors: give me an option to pay… a little bit ($30/year).. to get pristine reception.

For years, I have sketched out a simple diagram to explain my answers to these types of questions.

This diagram, the Design Pyramid, suggests that the design we can see and touch is just the tip of the iceberg.  It is supported by layers of information and prerequisite decisions that are largely invisible to the naked eye.  The four layers of the Pyramid are, from top to bottom: Design, Requirements, Vision, and Understanding.

The key premise of the Design Pyramid is that each layer can only be as good as those below it.

The Design Pyramid clarifies why many products and designs fail, and suggests what should be done differently in the product creation process to achieve breakthrough products.

Let’s go through each layer.

The Design Layer

The Design layer is simply the solution to a design problem.

The solution takes different form depending on what is being designed.  For software products, the solution includes the user experience architecture, the interactions, conceptual model, and the internal software architecture.  For a process design, the output is a process map.  For public policy, it’s a legislative bill, and so on.  In all cases, the design is the solution to a functional problem.

The Requirements Layer

Design requirements are detailed criteria that describe what the solution must accomplish.  They provide enough detail to give the team concrete guidance for designing and building the product, and for knowing when it is done.

Requirements can sometimes be a big, onerous deal.  When that’s the case it’s often because its authors are trying to do more than one thing at at time.  They are trying to write down requirements while they still figuring out the vision for the product.  Trying to do them both at the same time is like trying to paint a room while still deciding on a paint color.  It’s a lot easier to paint if you only have to worry about painting and not color schemes.

If the vision is flawed, incomplete or not properly thought through, the requirements will be difficult to write.  And they will be bound to shift radically, because the flaws in the vision can’t be swept under the rug forever.  Eventually they will make themselves known and will force the team to make major course corrections.

When the vision is clear and correct, the requirements fall out easily and are much more stable.

The Vision Layer

If you’re going to cross the sea in search of riches, it helps to know where you’re going, and it helps to know that where you are going will be a worthwhile destination.

A product’s vision is like the destination port.  It establishes the direction in which everyone should be paddling.   If the destination is not well-defined, at best, time and energy will be wasted making course corrections.  (If the new direction is chosen by the same means as the original destination, I would start to worry. Who’s to say that the new destination is much better?)

In the worst case, the ship runs out of supplies and never I makes it.   With a badly chosen destination, the journey has actually failed before it begins.  It couldn’t have made it no matter how hard everyone paddled.

And so it goes with products: a faulty vision dooms the initiative before it sets off.  When you see requirements shift repeatedly, or when you see a product get canceled just before or after launch, it’s a sure sign that the vision was fundamentally flawed from the get-go.

How can we translate the idea of product vision in more concrete terms that we can do something with?

Think of it this way.  Any group of customers has not one, but a whole host of needs.  We can’t possibly solve all of them, especially in the near term.  Before even attempting to solve them, we must first select which needs are worthy of solving, and we need to formulate the set of needs into a cohesive package.

This is the purpose of product vision process.  The vision establishes which problems the design should solve.  (This is equivalent to establishing which profile of customer needs we should address out of the universe of possibilities.)

That is the vision layer.  Where do the flaws in the vision arise?  They often stem from missing or erroneous assumptions, which reside in the Understanding layer below.

The Understanding Layer

If the vision is the destination port of the journey, then our Understanding is the map of the seas and ports.  We need the map to peruse our destination options.

This is where the Understanding layer comes in.

The Understanding layer is made up of pretty much any insight that help us come up with a good solution.  That is a pretty broad definition.  In practice, there is a core set of elements that we need to understand no matter what we are designing — a software product, a business process, a building, or a piece of legislation.  We need:

1. Understanding of stakeholders: who the customers and users and others?  How they naturally segment themselves, so we are clear on who needs what?
2. Understanding their specific situations and needs: we need to understand not only what matters to them, but why it matters.  Achieving the “why” is what lets us attain the deeper empathy with the stakeholders that lets us put ourselves in their situation.  It’s what allows us to interpolate and extrapolate beyond what they tell us they need —  beyond what they may even be capable of telling us — to what they actually need.  And this is what lets us create things that customers will want, but which they cannot anticipate  (Hint: this is a key source of innovation!)
3. Understanding of the competition: It does us little good to address needs that are already solved well enough by the competition.  We need to understand where the competition is now and where they are heading.
4. Understanding of the status quo:if we are improving on an existing product, we need to get honest and lay bare its limitations, devoid of spin.
5. Understanding of technology: Technology is not an end in and of itself.  It’s a means to addressing important unmet needs.  We need to understand the nature of current and emerging technology so we can connect what is needed by customers with what is possible thanks to technology.

How well we understand all of these things determines the upper bound on the quality of our vision.  A shallow understanding begets shallow, unimpressive product visions.  Breakthrough insight leads to breakthrough product vision.

Now that we’ve touched on all four layers, let’s use the Design Pyramid to get back to some of the questions I opened with.

Why is great product design so elusive?

Each layer of the Design Pyramid is only as good as those below it.  If the requirements don’t make sense, then neither will the design. If the vision is flawed, the design will be irrelevant; the product is solving a problem that is unimportant to customers.  If the understanding of customers and their needs is flawed, it will misinform the vision and undermine the whole effort.

Great product design is elusive not because of flaws in the design effort but because of inadequacies at the lower two levels of the Pyramid: Understanding and Vision.

The vision layer gets short shrift in common practice, despite its profound influence on the outcome.  Organizations have teams that are are eager to jump in the boat and get paddling, and they rarely allot time to properly draw a map and chart a course to a worthy destination.

Some organizations do put effort into arriving at breakthrough product visions.  But without clarity on the ingredients, without a good conceptual model and process, the efforts often fall flat.  (This is something I help clients with!)

Product vision is the missing discipline in product creation, and a ripe area to be matured over the next ten years.  (I’ll have heaps more to say about this in the coming months!)

Where does the Design Pyramid apply?

The power of the Design Pyramid is that its lessons apply to all types of functional design.

I’m using the term “product” in this article, but the Design Pyramid also applies to any functional design problem including interaction design, information architecture, services, database design, new process workflow, retail store layout, public policy, architecture, legislation and more.

All of these type of functional problems have the same intrinsic nature: we need masterful understanding of customers, competitors and technology to sculpt a vision of a problem with solving.  The high-level vision needs to be translated into concrete and actionable requirements so we know the characteristics of a “good” design.

[nb. Designs that are primarily about aesthetics, emotions, taste, and fashion operate under a different set of rules.  I would not look to the Design Pyramid for guidance on composing a song, writing a poem or painting a mural.]

Where do breakthrough products come from?

Breakthrough product ideas come from from breakthrough understanding.  The spark happens at the understanding level and bubbles its way up the Design Pyramid, inspiring the vision that guides the requirements that guides the design.

Take, for example, the overused example of the iPod.  Apple noticed that early batch of MP3 players played music well enough, but getting songs on the device was excruciatingly slow over the USB 1.0 interfaces common at the time.  Plus, the quirky, proprietary music transfer software was hard to manage.  This was a real problem.  The solid-state devices of the day had such small capacity that unless you liked listening to the same three albums over and over again, you had to spend a lot of time transferring new music onto the device.  Because of this cost, MP3 players often ended up gathering dust in a drawer.  These were Apple’s core insights, at the Understanding level of the Pyramid.

The iPod vision was sculpted to address these problems: make music management easy with great desktop software (iTunes); make transfers fast (using Firewire) and make transfers rarely necessary (with a high-capacity, hard-drive based player). Beyondthis, Apple understood that the that gadgets you are seen with in public are a reflection of your image, and that an MP3 player should look and feel cool.

Their easy, fast, high-capacity, cool looking iPod was a breakthrough product that virtually owned the digital music market through its entire arc (until smartphones and pocketable computers like the iPod Touch relegated the single-purpose music player to niche product).

If you examine other breakthrough innovations (see the product vision hall of fame), you will find this same pattern: key insights into customer needs (understanding) leading to radically different problem definition (visions), translating into unique requirements.  When a good vision is followed through with excellent design (not to mention engineering, marketing, sales, distribution and support… you know, the easy stuff) the stage is set for a breakthrough product.

There is heaps more to say about product vision, so stay tuned!

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Thanks to Michael Poremba and David Cortright for reviewing earlier drafts of this article.

[Updated 10/14/09 - Edited for clarity]

Paradigm shifts for key events in human history

You know that feeling we all have these days? That boy, things sure are different than a few years ago? Where we can type a few keystrokes, get a recommended restaurant, its location on the map, directions to it, a photo of its storefront?

All from a beautiful little phone?

For free?

In 2007 we take this for granted, and consider the pre-Google Maps world of 2004 to be the olden days. (The pre-Facebook, pre-blog, pre-e-commerce days are already ancient history.)

Is that wonderment of rapid change just a now feeling? Will it fade as we take for granted the innovations that have changed our lives so much over so few years?

The answer is no, we won’t lose that feeling of wonderment over new things, because there is no end in sight to them. Innovations will continue to arrive at our doorstep in brown cardboard boxes at a faster and faster pace.

2007 will feel like the olden days even sooner than 2004 did. It’s the nature of the accelerating returns of technology. This much is obvious after watching Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 seminal, mind-blowing talk on the idea.

The concept is that every generation of technology makes the subsequent generation faster and cheaper.
Moore’s Law (which predicts the doubling of computing power every 18 months or so) is one example. So is the evolution of life on the planet. And the extension of life into technology. And the inevitable future integration of technology into life. And, for that matter, life made out of technology.

Imagine, if you can, the same accelerating curve in medicine, energy and machine intelligence, leading to some unimaginable technological singularity. If you have trouble, let Kurtzweil do it for you.

You can watch an abridged 20 minute TED video (Feb 2005) of his talk. But I recommend you immerse yourself in the 90 minute Long Now talk. The Ogg Vorbis audio version* is loud and clear; skip the first 5 minutes of announcements. (The quality of the video and MP3 versions is bad.)

—–
[*The iPod is not smart enough to play Ogg Vorbis files, but you can convert the Ogg file to MP3 using Audacity or other tools.]

Apple already got AT&T to do the work to support visual voicemail. This is a good thing for users, since it’s much faster to be able to use one’s eyes to navigate interfaces than only one’s ears.

But why must voicemail be accessible only from your cellphone? Users already have a web login for their cellphone accounts. Why not allow users to access voicemail through a web interface? Then you could skim the messages, type text message responses from the browser or even initiate a callback from the far more efficient UI of your computer. (The callback would call your cellphone then the other party’s.)

While we’re at it, why not have an IMAP connector to your voicemail? You could then process voice messages as you process your email. The only difference is when you open the email message there would be a voice attachment to play. Since it’s using the glorious magic of IMAP, messages you read or delete are kept in sync with the server and your mobile phone, so your phone doesn’t nag you with a message you already processed. (Office VoIP PBX phone systems have permitted these scenarios for years, and they are great.)

By the same token: It’s been two years since I wrote about how cellphone configuration would be better done with a web interface. Is anyone doing this yet?

Why must this be so?  Why can’t we have multiple active phones tied to the same number?  Cellphones are so cheap.

Why not allow multiple phones to be tied to one mobile number?  Then, an incoming call would call all of them.  It would allow all sorts of wonderful scenarios.  You could have:

• You could keep your powerful PDA/communicator/GPS smartphone like the iPhone as your main device
• You could have another tiny mini-cellphone/MP3 player to take running — something like an “iPhone Shuffle”.  (Today I must leave my phone behind because it is too bulky to run with.  But I’d rather have one with me for contingencies.)
• You could have a backup cellphone to grab when you are rushing out the door, when you misplace or lose one
• You could have a real, standalone hands-free cellphone integrated into your car.   No messing with clumsy cables or bluetooth to dock it to your one and only phone.
• You could have a cellphone built into your laptop computer. Your computer would “ring” when someone called.   You could answer it there on speaker phone.  You could process voicemail visually from your desktop.  The cellphone service would provide your laptop with data, voice and video call connectivity when you are away from a friendly WiFi signal.
• You could replace your home service and home wireless phone with 2 or 3 cellphones cradled around the house.  You could walk into the yard or even down the block without losing service.

Readers: We in the USA are mobile phone laggards. Does this capability exist anywhere in the world yet?

NEW request [1/5/09]  If you could have multiple phone lines directed to the same cellphone, then you could have your home phone ring both spouses, and you could have your office number also go to you main cellphone.  Of course you’d want to be able to configure any number to drop right into voicemail.  You don’t want work calls to interfere with your weekend or vacation life.  (This capability is close to what GrandCentral does, but I’m imagining the experience to be more unified, with less players and complexity.)

[Updated 1/5/09 to clarify and add the multiple-numbers per cellphone.]

MyOwnBags come in many fabrics and colors

Ania designed a bag that she would want to use:

• strong enough to carry a heavy load of groceries
• light and compactable so it could be squished into its own little pouch and kept in a woman’s purse whenever she needed it
• large capacity so that multiple bags are not needed on a small shopping trip
• versatile, so it could be used not just for groceries but for yoga, gym, beach, clothes shopping, changes of clothes
• fashionable, to look good while being eco. They come in many fabrics and do not have huge gaudy phrases trumpeting the owner’s environmental sensitivity
• washable, so the bag can withstand grocery detritus and can be used for a long time without looking dirty and ratty

Ania created her reusable bags years before they became commonplace and way before progressive municipalities like San Francisco started banning plastic bags. Now there are dozens of players in the game. Amazingly, the MyOwnBag product vision has held up well against the flood of competitors:

• Grocery stores sell canvas bags that look like stiff green shopping bags. Pretty good for reducing waste but you cannot keep it in your purse at the ready.
• Many companies sell $5 nylon bags that fold into nothing. They are commendable for making something that can be carried around, and cheap enough that anyone could buy them. But they are typically over-branded and look like garbage bags when freed from their sac. You wouldn’t be seen with it for other trips around town.
• Hermès, Louis Vuitton and others have designer grocery bags for fashionistas willing to pay $500 – $1700.
• Various gym, yoga or beach bags are optimized for their stated purpose but are not meant for groceries

Here is what this comparison looks like in a needs table, which includes the original comparison points, paper and plastic bags (3 is better; 0 is worse):

Needs table comparing various types of shopping bags

The needs analysis clarifies the differentiation among these competitors. For each customer need along the top you can see which solution does a good job of solving it. You can compare any two solutions and immediately see the important differences between them and which niche each has carved out.

From this chart you can see that MyOwnBag is the only reusable shopping bag that squishes down to a little pouch, and is useful for for things other than grocery shopping, and is chic and may be worn proudly around town, without costing $500.

There is one other need which MyOwnBag solves excellently: your need to find a unique gift for your chic, environmentally-sensitive friend, for about $40 to $60.

Warning: do not give her a plastic bag.

.

For more on needs analysis, please see:

• Needs analysis technique at ProductVision.org
• Needs Analysis of Vehicles

I plunked down my credit card no more than five minutes after seeing David Creemer’s mention of the Chumby.

Here is the first product I have seen that embodies the future envisioned at the dawn of the Web era. An unobtrusive, wireless, sub-$200 Internet terminal with no specific purpose.

The Chumby Internet device, about $195 shipped.

That no-specific-purpose part partitions people who hear about the Chumby. Some see it as its greatest weakness, others see it as its greatest strength. I’m in the latter camp. I think the potential and relevance of this class of device is enormous. Here are some scenarios:

Alarms of every stripe: It’s time to wake up. It’s time to sell Google. It’s time to move the car for street cleaning. My checking balance is getting low; better transfer some funds. Oh my, something big exploded somewhere. Oops, we left the garage door open. Looks like a storm is brewing. Uh-oh, traffic is bad on 101. Oooh, Tahoe got a huge dump of snow. Oh! Was that an earthquake? How big, and how far? Hurry! Wii’s are available! Shh! Stay low! There is someone at the front door and he’s carrying a clipboard!

Ambient awareness: What time is it? How many minutes before my next appointment? Ah, my web traffic is growing nicely, and I even made $0.42 this week with Adsense. Cool, there’s the updated status of a bunch of my Facebook friends. It’s Friday night and three of my friends have no plans; maybe I will call them. Hmmm, it’s only foggy in my neighborhood of San Francisco, not everywhere How does it look in St. Catherine’s Street in Montreal? Does the baby look ok with the nanny? We’ve been using a lot of energy this month. Philip’s birthday is in a few days.

Control: Time to put the house lights, climate and security in bed-time mode / away for the evening mode / away for vacation mode. Time to put on ambient jazz or groove or drone or classical or acoustic chick rock or energetic rock throughout the house to suit the current mood. Tell the DVR to record Heroes and Earl.

Tools: Alarm clock. Kitchen timer. Game timer. My favorite Epicurious recipes. The family calendar in the kitchen.

Decoration: Ah there are photos showing what I was doing every year this month for as long as I have been collecting digital pictures.

Communication: Receive a video voicemail. Press a couple of buttons and record a voice message to your spouse.

On-demand radio: Listen to the latest NPR news broadcast in the bathroom, when you are shaving.

One could go on. I could imagine several Chumby’s around the house as views and controllers being fed by the same model. (Our mobile phones would take part, too.)

One piece apparently missing on the platform is a coherent infrastructure for pulling together alarms, ambient awareness, control, and tools. From what I can tell, the first batch of applets will be disjointed, inconsistent, mostly useless. The signal-to-noise ratio of useful vs. demo applets is too low, as happened with Palm apps and desktop widgets.

But with the Chumby, the technology and price point have arrived. The only thing in the way of most of these scenarios is a mere matter of design and code.

Instead, do a better job at figuring out where customers really are, and chase them instead.

Download a printable PDF of this graphic to post in the hallway.

the thing that continues to amaze me is that smart people at successful companies still form weak visions based on features, assumptions and the competition, not on customer needs. [..] Executives ask the question “How are we going to beat [most successful competitor]?” Features are added just to put a check mark on the box. And when you ask why, nobody can say the true reason any of these things are a good idea. [..] all the effort spent ultimately amounts to nothing.

Amen to that, brother!

$10,000 Honeywell Kitchen Computer from 1969. No units were sold. You can visit it at the Computer History Museum.

One era’s flop is often another era’s success. The typical excuse given for failure is something vague like, “the market wasn’t ready for it” or “the product was ahead of its time.” I dislike these phrases, as they shrug off our responsibility to predict what customers will accept, and they shift the blame to the vagaries of customer behavior and psychology.

Yes, sometimes it’s true that mainstream customers need plenty of role models around them before they’ll even entertain the possibility of trying a new technology. It took some convincing to get people to try out the first microwaves, mobile phones, email and the Web.

But just as often, the early attempts at a product fail simply because they do not meed important customer needs at a realistic price.

It shouldn’t have been a stretch for Honeywell to realize that a kitchen computer that cost $10,000 in 1969 dollars, that required the housewife to take a two week course to learn to program the device, using toggle-switch input and binary light output, might not be a blockbuster. Despite its integrated cutting board.

3Com Audrey of 2000

A more recent attempt at a kitchen computer was a quick flame-out by 3Com called the Audrey in 2000. But that was before widespread broadband and WiFi, before large, cheap LCD panels and many other enabling technologies. For the price, it too was not about to earn its place under the cupboard.

We now we have enabling technologies lined up to make a device plausible: cheap computers, thin LCDs, fast, wireless Internet connectivity. Is the time right to make place for a computer in the kitchen?   There is anecdotal evidence of the demand: no fewer than three of my friends remodeling kitchens are designing a place for a kitchen computer. Lead users often portend larger trends (see von Hippel, The Sources of Innovation).

The need is apparently there, the technological ingredients are in place.  There is no external barrier, so now we await a major manufacturer to introduce a well-designed device and establish the category. (Waits like this are hard to predict. They could take months or years.)

Users can, of course, get by nicely today with a laptop in a cubby.  Many do.  But for high-end remodels that kind of retrofit won’t do.  So here are some specs that we can compare against the next wave of kitchen computers. These specs describe a relatively full-feature devices for big, fancy kitchen. They would be pared down for lower-end products.

Key scenarios for a kitchen computer

1. General lightweight web surfing
2. Family information appliance
3. Follow a recipe while cooking
4. Possible homework & surfing station
5. Audio controller, for background music and talk while doing kitchen activities
6. Decorative element, as a digital photo frame

Features of a kitchen computer

1. Attractiveness, since it’s part of the décor. Designed for a kitchen, not an office.
2. Different finish options to match with different décors. People remodeling choose from hundreds of tiles and paint colors and one style does not fit all.
3. Touch screen for most common tasks.
4. Wireless keyboard and mouse, normally stored, can be pulled out for more serious use.
5. Resilient to spills, oils, greasy fingers. Durable for kid usage.
6. Unobtrusive, since there is enough clutter in the kitchen.
   • Only a thin display is outwardly visible. The main unit is concealed within cabinetry, along with cabling.
   • Display takes up no precious counter space. It is mounted on an arm and, when not in use, folds under a cabinet or rotates flush against the wall. In use while cooking it hinges out. When used for homework or sit-down surfing, it lowers to a work surface.
   • The main unit (if there is one, apart from the display) is small like the Mac Mini to minimize consumption of precious cabinet volume.
   • Speakers are built into the display to further reduce footprint.
   • Quiet, fanless operation. Does not contribute to the background noise.
7. Central control – Display can completely control the device including powering it on. There is never a need to dig into the cabinets to fuss with the device.
8. Media playback, particularly music.
   • Hidden main unit includes amp for speakers and speaker output.
   • Remote control to control playback while across the room or in adjoining room.
   • If IR is used for remote control, the display includes the IR receiver, to allow for line-of-sight.
   • Display matches ambient light in room. When the room is dark, the display turns itself off.
9. Always on, or instant on. As an appliance it must have instant availability.
10. Low power consumption since it’s always on.

Special Software

The kitchen computer should be a standard, full-function personal computer for when it is needed for homework or general usage. For key tasks it should revert to a minimal, streamlined appliance mode with highly tailored apps that don’t require the keyboard or mouse.

1. Family calendar/coordination center visible at a glance, with alarms and reminders.[Has anyone cracked this critical user need yet?]
2. Digital photo frame when idle.
   • Automatic, smart photo syncing with other photo libraries devices in the house. You don’t have to do any management for the images to remain fresh.
   • “Best of” photos from prior years appear automatically.
   • They match the current season, so you don’t get inappropriate winter wonderland pictures in July.
3. Music controller
   • User can stream music from other servers in the house or from Internet radio
   • Can be controlled by the display, either with physical buttons or a touch-driven on-screen UI.
4. Recipe software? This is maybe. Recipes demand flexibility and resilience, something paper excels at. But if a simplified touch-screen UI were to be layered on an outstanding cooking site like Epicurious we would have something. Also: recipe videos on demand is a killer kitchen app, since it’s so much easier to see cooking techniques demonstrated.
5. Standard info appliance stuff to check out while scarfing down your cereal: Weather forecast so you know what to wear. Traffic so you know what to expect during the commute. Top news & sports items so you are up to speed on what’s going on. RSS feeds from the school. Buttons to most-used websites. Number of waiting email or voicemail messages.
6. Quick & dirty email checker. Quickly skim & read email messages & compose short replies, even canned replies, without having to pull out the keyboard & mouse. For full-on email answering mode, pull out the keyboard or switch to your main PC.
7. Family message center? This is another maybe. It’s a traditional scenario envisioned for a kitchen computer. But introducing yet another messaging medium could be a stretch, given how inundated we already are with messaging solutions. If it were to happen, here’s a viable way: Mom presses a “record” button on the display and speaks a message for Junior. The audio is stored on a server, and a link to it is sent via email or text message to Junior, who can retrieve it on a PC or cellphone. A bright button appears on the kitchen appliance for Junior, until he retrieves the message from any means.
8. Videophone — no longer a futuristic scenario, especially for Mac users. Dad can see that Jane, who is away at college, is available for videochat. This is simply a different wrapper around iChat, still by far the best-of-breed for video calls.
9. Integration with other home automation: distributed audio, lighting & climate control, alarm system. [Home automation is another field that is under-developed for the times, in need of an Apple-esque kick in the butt.]

With computers once again at a plateau, new outlets tend to emerge. We should expect to see a trickle of kitchen computers come to market. If they are designed around the usage scenarios they will be a welcome addition to the kitchen, not just gratuitous technology.

[Update 8/22/08 - touched up wording]

Marty points out a troublesome pattern at some companies where there is no single product owner. A “business person” defines the high-level product definition and the product manager writes the requirements.

The problem is that neither person truly owns the product, and more importantly, neither person feels and behaves like they are the one ultimately responsible for the product.

This is true. If the business person is an executive, they may not have the deep, detailed understanding of customers that is essential for defining a product vision.

I do have a quibble to pick with a side point in Marty’s essay. He goes on to say:

Further, this model is based on a flawed view of software that believes that you can define high-level product requirements independent of detailed requirements and especially the user experience.

I respectfully disagree. Not only is it possible to separate the vision (high-level requirements) from the detailed requirements and design, it’s a very good idea.

Most companies obsess about the details too early and too often. They have trouble breaking away and questioning the purpose of the product and its features, and they lose sight of the big picture. When you see products that are perennially mired in incrementalism and features wars, this is what is going on.

The remedy is to treat product vision as a distinct problem to solve. It requires putting aside the product’s details, having faith that they can be worked out later. The first job is to figure out the important needs to solve. Hold those needs sacred. Ignore constraints and precedent, requirements and design. Trust that a great solution will be found. Then, during requirements and design, find it.

Apple seems to demonstrate this mentality over and over. With the iPhone, they figured out that a voice prompts-driven UI for voicemail was terribly inefficient, and that users needed a more streamlined approach. They set about building a UI they call “visual voicemail.” This required changes well outside Apple’s purview, at the mobile phone carrier’s back-end system. By focusing on the “what” and (temporarily) ignoring the “how” they were able to achieve a breakthrough solution.

Inventor Charles Kettering (1876-1958) said, “A problem well-stated is a problem half solved.” Product vision is about stating the problem. Detailed requirements and design come later.

everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

Rumors of the desktop’s demise are premature. As described in my analysis of Hosted vs. Local Applications there are simply too many important scenarios for the desktop to go away. Information and creativity workers spend much of their waking lives using computers and require the fastest response possible. They require reliable access to them, even at 30,000 feet, even at overcrowded overseas cafés. They and the businesses and governments they work for require sovereignty over their sensitive information.

The solution to these needs is locally stored apps and data. This will not change for a long time.

Casual users & Internet Appliances

That said, most people on the planet are not information workers. They’re like my mom. Year after year, she uses her computer for communicating, browsing, light gaming and not much more. Her PC is both overpowered and sub-par for the job: overpowered with capacity she will never use, sub-par because it takes too long to bootstrap that capacity just to check email. The telephone gives a dial tone the moment the receiver is lifted — why can’t the machine show your latest messages the moment the email button is pressed?

Casual computer users like my mom would be better served by an inexpensive Internet appliance. For these users, it doesn’t matter whether apps and data are stored locally or remotely, as long as a stable net connection is available. New users in developing countries fall into the same camp.

This era of Internet appliances is almost upon us with new categories of products like the Palm Foleo, the OLPC, the iPhone, and the Nokia Internet Tablet. These type of portable devices (sometimes blended with, sometimes an adjunct to a cellphone) will become the only machine many people in the world will ever need. Especially when they become cheap and dockable to keyboards, mice and larger monitors for longer stretches of use (that’s a vision to steal).

Hybrid apps

Paul Graham and I need not argue about extremes like the death or immortality of the desktop. There is a happy medium between all-hosted and all-local applications, a Reese’s Peanut Butter solution. The best of both worlds is to download and cache first class applications in their entirety and run them locally with the highest-fidelity UI frameworks available. (Hint: not AJAX, not browser apps). The apps would update themselves from trusted sources when necessary — seamlessly, automatically, in the background, with no hands. They would give users access to data that is best stored locally (high definition movies, private data and photos, and so on). Since today’s OS platforms do not support this I’m counting it as another vision to steal.

A stepping stone to this future is the Either/Or Apps (EOAs) — web apps running in a web browser that may be local or remote. AJAX and Flex are pushing the boundaries of app richness within a browser frame. But they are still within a browser frame, an unsuitable container for a complete computing experience. Adobe, Microsoft and Sun are on the case with AIR, Silverlight, and JavaFX respectively, new platforms for rich internet applications (RIAs) that live on the desktop rather than within the browser.

As we look forward to the Internet Appliance era, we can put away the eulogy for the desktop. It will not be necessary.

8/3/07 Update: The Zonbu is directly targeted to the casual computer users described above. It is only $100! Great deal! I think. Plus $13/month for 2 years Linux PC with local applications, 4GB of flash storage and remote backup. Total cost $370.95 for 2 years. Optical drive and WiFi costs extra $49+$29=$78. Total so far $449. Monitor, mouse and keyboard are not included. Photo storage will be constrained. Flash video stutters. It’s Linux. It doesn’t work with iTunes or any other Mac-only or Windows-only app. Down the slippery slope we go. Maybe your mom would be better off with a Mac Mini?

See also:

• Hosted vs. Local Applications
• DabbleDB, FileMaker Pro, and Innovation

More recently there was a story about Internet café’s here in San Francisco and how one of the premier hotspots is just a few blocks from my house.

I would love to walk down and do some work in that environment, but open wi-fi means no encryption between your laptop and the base station. That means anyone nearby can sniff my packets and monitor my communications. Easily, and with no special tech knowledge. Hacking has become a point-and-click endeavor.

To make matters worse, AT&T (was: SBC, was: PacBell) does not encrypt email communications. If I open my email application, every few minutes it will connect to the server, broadcasting my password in the clear for all nearby hackers. Not a bright idea in an Internet café teeming with San Francisco’s nouveau dot commers.

It got me wondering why it was this way. Today, for Wi-Fi communications to be encrypted it means each user must enter a password. Not very convenient for patrons of Internet café’s. But if you turn off password protection you also lose encryption to the base station. It’s an either-or situation.

And the issue is not relegated to Wi-Fi communications. Ethernet LAN connections are similarly insecure. Anyone else on your network can sniff your packets.

For precision and clarity, here is the problem statement rendered as SSNiFs scenarios:

Can’t we have our cake and eat it too? Why can’t the base station establish secure communications to user even without a password? The router and the laptop would each generate key pairs and exchange public keys for the session. No passwords, high encryption standards. As for wired, Ethernet connections, why can’t they do the same?

Seems like a pretty obvious need and idea, doesn’t it? Surely I’m not the first to have thought of this.

Turns out I’m not. I asked my friend David Creemer, who is in possession of sixty percent of all human knowledge and therefore usually a useful resource. He wrote:

The capability you ask for is slowly getting deployed, and is part of the 802.1x authentication standard. 802.1x is mostly associated with WiFi, but works perfectly well on ethernet, etc. It provides for per-port or per-connection authentication, authorization, and encryption. On the Mac, you might see it as “WPA2-Enterprise” on the WiFi password panel. Though generally used with a password or other credential, it can do encryption with no or trivial authentication.

So, it’s coming. Eventually. Deployment of this sort of thing takes years so it could be a while.

Which begs the broader question about product vision. This scenarios is pretty straightforward, isn’t it? Obvious even, at least in retrospect? How could the purveyors of wireless networking standards have missed this use case, dooming years of users to the invisible perils of insecure communications? Moreover, Ethernet LANs have been around for decades now. How did they miss it?

Was it a fear of performance degradation due to encrypting all packets? Was it because customers do not appreciate security risks and hence do not demand stronger solutions from vendors? Or was it a lack of foresight on the part of the standards bodies — a lapse of vision into this core, critical scenario?
—
One final note: Even with the secure WiFi connection described here, your data is only safe within the café, not on its journey between the café and its destination. For that you need to establish a VPN connection. And we continue to wait for widespread, facilitated email encryption.

by David S. Cortright

There has been a lot of talk about “design thinking” in the press over the last few years. Design thinking is literally thinking like a designer. Designers keenly observe the world around them, identify users who have unmet needs, and design solutions that fulfill the needs for those users.

I saw the movie March of the Penguins about a year ago. It’s a great documentary that follows the yearly cycle of reproduction for emperor penguins in Antarctica. The penguins make a long trek inland, pair up, and mate. After the female lays her egg, the male guard the egg and keeps it warm for four months with no food or water, in near total darkness, at bitter cold temperatures, huddling together with other males to keep warm, all the while balancing his egg on their feet and keeping it warm and protected under his belly. Meanwhile the female reverses the trek back to the ocean to stock up on food for her family while doing her best not to get eaten by a leopard seal, and then walks back to her mate to relieve him of the now-hatched chick, both of whom are extremely hungry.

And the whole time, while I’m marveling at this amazing and beautiful process of nature, in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “these penguins have a lot of unmet needs.” They are hungry, cold, and tired; they need to keep their egg safe, gather food for their chick, and meet up with their mate again after an extended separation. So many unmet needs, out of which fall so many possible solutions.

There could be penguin shelters for getting out of the cold and wind; penguin egg incubators, where you could check in your egg and have the service keep it warm and safe; penguin snack stands for taking the edge off those 4-month-long hunger pangs; a penguin communication service to keep in touch with your mate while separated (which of course would alert the male if the female gets eaten, and alert the female if the male loses the egg). This is a vast, untapped market.

Now if only penguins had money…

David S. Cortright is a veteran Bay Area interaction designer.  He was at Yahoo! when he wrote this and is now, as of summer 2008, the proprietor of Rated-Best.org, a list of highest rated products.

Local vs. Hosted Computing

This goes to the old debate between local versus hosted computing. The debate started in the mid-90′s with Sun and Oracle trying to battle Microsoft’s dominance by replacing “fat clients” — full-featured PCs with their own storage — with “thin clients” that left most of the computing and all of the storage up to the servers.

That was in the early days of the web and it didn’t stand a chance at that time. None of the infrastructure could support the quality of user experience that was taken for granted with desktop apps. All the software industry had to do was wait for those massive initiates to run out of breath and money.

Fast forward a decade. Now we have fast, cheap, nearly ubiquitous connectivity, super fast servers and local machines, cheap gargantuan hosted storage. And we finally have a nascent medium for distributed applications: web browsers with AJAX (and friends).

So the debate is back, argued this time by the likes of Google and Yahoo with hosted productivity applications that are walking and talking more and more like desktop apps. Applications like Google’s spreadsheet, Yahoo’s rich email client and now DabbleDB, a rich online database app (which I am sure someone will snap up for big bucks very quickly).

And so the pendulum appears to be swinging back to something that kind of looks like the days of yore: mainframe computers that knew and did all and dumb terminals that channeled them.

Will the pendulum swing all the way back to a fully hosted world? Should it? Let’s review the debate.

What’s good about hosted apps

A future of hosted apps are great if you travel, if you need to travel light, if you aren’t good for managing your own system or if you have to share computers. Here are the arguments for hosted apps laid out neatly as SSNiF scenarios:

What’s bad about hosted apps

Connected computing certainly has its place, but there will always be reasons for needing to have your apps and your data local. Here are the SSNiFs:

No wonder we have a dilemma. Those are some pretty strong needs on both sides of the equation. Choosing either direction trades off the other.

Vision to Steal

Meanwhile, we still wish we could consider DabbleDB but we can’t because it’s a hosted app. The same goes for other apps like Google Calendar or Intuit’s useful QuickBase. Wouldn’t it be nice if those vendors could just sell me a standalone version for my own use, or for my private workgroup’s use, without me having to be a webmaster?

Operating systems vendors: Can you please come up with a consumer-grade way to let users of standalone desktop computers run web apps locally?

Consumer-grade here means:

• No thinking about Apache or security concerns or being concerned about installing the latest version of MySQL or Perl or PHP or chron jobs.
• Install, uninstall and upgrade apps the Mac way, by dragging and dropping a single icon. Withstands operating system upgrades.
• Launch the local web app by double-clicking it. It opens into the browser.
• Allow the app normal access to the hard drive once it’s been welcomed in. Reads and writes the same types of documents as any other app.
• Let me switch on the app for others who can see my machine on the network. This way, selling into small workgroups would not require an IT specialist managing a server. It would be equivalent to the old pre-Web FileMaker Pro approach. Run it on anyone’s machine and turn on multi-user mode.

There are technical and standards hurdles to achieving this. But we need to get from here to there somehow, there being the place of convergence where we don’t care if an app is “native” or “hosted”… whether it runs as a Mac app or a Windows app or just a web app, whether the app is right here or out there. And where developers don’t have to fret over which platform to support.

Maybe someday, hosting computing will be the norm. The cost- and hassle-reduction benefits suggest that it will win out for casual users like Mom, students, information workers and by those who cannot afford their own machines (that’s a prediction). But the scenarios calling for local computing are also strong and will persist for the foreseeable future.

FileMaker falls into the trap

FileMaker Pro is probably still the best-in-breed product for mom-and-pop data management. It’s a solid product, a product of integrity: fast, reliable and plays well with others. I have used it daily for over a decade for many purposes.

But FileMaker long ago fell into the classic innovator’s dilemma. They paid too much heed to their most vocal users, database developers. Database developers are not everyday people. They are technical and they need to build sophisticated solutions for their clients. They vociferously demand power, and are far more tolerant of complexities that stymie normal people.

By giving this vocal minority what it wants FileMaker neglected its roots: the everyday productivity worker — people like teachers, baseball coaches or small business owners. While the product got increasingly powerful, fundamentals that would have made the everyday user’s life better (such as a modern auto-complete data input controls or Google-like searching) were neglected. Thus a strong unmet need has been left behind for a competitor to come along.

Coulda Been Contenders

What other everyman database contenders are there? There’s Microsoft Access, written by and for developers. It sure ain’t a schoolteacher’s database. Access just took the old relational database mentality and built a desktop app around it. There was no new thinking about how normal people could and should go about managing and making sense of their data. Access has always been far behind FileMaker in simplicity despite the opportunity to learn from it and do better. Microsoft was going after a different audience: developersdevelopersdevelopers, again leaving normal people without a simple tool for their jobs.

Anything else? Microsoft Excel probably had the best shot at consumerizing database management. People use it as such and it actually is sufficient and flexible enough for many basic jobs. Excel even has some useful, well-hidden features to help you manage and understand your data (I’m thinking of conditional formatting and auto-filtering).

But a few features don’t a paradigm make. Excel never credibly broke beyond the paradigm of the VisiCalc spreadsheet. (That was a while ago; VisiCalc is a contemporary of Ms. PacMan.) Don’t get me wrong – spreadsheets are useful in their own right, and it probably wasn’t Excel’s destiny to become a true database. The point is, the holy grail of robust yet simple data management remains undiscovered.

(I should mention that if you are looking for a hosted database solution to use, check out Intuit’s QuickBase. It is a simple, flexible and well-established online database app giving FileMaker a run for its money.)

The Innovator’s Dilemma predicts that sooner or later someone will come along with a paradigm-busting innovation that renders the past thinking obsolete. I’m not sure this is it yet, but DabbleDB is bursting with new thinking. It should make the old skoolers think hard about how they are solving customer needs and what has been possible all the while, going back ten years, if only the problem had been looked at in a different way.

DabbleDB’s Innovations

DabbleDB is getting a lot of attention because of how it pushes the envelope on interactivity within a browser (need we say “Web 2.0“?). It is an exemplary role model for a desktop app-like experience. But it’s the thinking behind how users should be able to view and manipulate their data that excites me. Some examples:

• DabbleDB lets you flip between table view and grouped lists like it’s no big deal. This capability lets you group a list of names by profession, then by city then by company. In FileMaker you can only see grouped information as printable reports. You cannot edit or act on data in this view, an ancient limitation.
• DabbleDB allows ad-hoc changes to the data structure – especially in converting flat tables into relational structures so you can look at your data inside out. This type of conversion is a bear in FileMaker Pro, requiring that you set up tables, munge data, import multiple times and make sure things are connected.
• DabbleDB rethinks the balance between optimizing for fine-tuned control over layouts versus quick & dirty data analysis. FileMaker gives very fine control over layout. This control is no doubt needed in many realms but comes at a trade-off of convenience and speed. DabbleDB instead emphasizes letting you twist your data around until it makes sense, and then letting you save that view. It’s this ability for normal people to do ad-hoc data mining that is so badly needed.
• DabbleDB lets the user search across all fields Google-style. This is an everyday need that we’ve grown accustomed to thanks to search engines. It’s basic functionality in DabbleDB, but requires advanced techniques in FileMaker.
• DabbleDB attempts to pull off relational databases without invoking obtuse relational database theory. I’m not sure yet whether it succeeded. They may have just subbed in other concepts. For example what we know of as a table, they call a category.
• DabbleDB starts to integrate alternate data views, specifically a calendar view. If you have timestamped data, DabbleDB lets you view, filter, edit it in a calendar view like it’s no big deal. A calendar view is just the beginning though.

Let me see! Let me see!

It’s another disappointment that for the last fifteen years, in order to see your information you have needed to wrestle it into Excel’s charting feature.

I’d like to see a data visualization arms race with vendors competing on how well they can help you see — and therefore make sense of — your data. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to explore scatters, trends, correlations, distributions, maps, timelines and networks by poking a few buttons directly from the database environment. (There’s a vision to steal, by the way.) It’s not the data that matters as much as the insight gleaned from that data.

(Another vision to steal: Someone please create a solid timeline view of data for mapping out historical events or future plans. It’s hard for us humans to visualize chronologies. We’ve been without a mainstream tool to help with this forever.)

Tag, you’re it

Here’s a specific design to steal for everyday database products, including DabbleDB: Support tagging as a data type. Tagging is just a new name for the old concept of keywording, but it’s useful whenever you need to assign an indefinite number of categories to something, from a growable list of possibilities. (If you need examples, check out any blog or Flikr or Technorati.)

A tagging feature in an end-user database app would let end-users apply zero or more tags to a record, provide an efficient input UI that facilitates applying existing tags, let the user search against tags, and support adding new tags on the fly as an option.

The Big But

As interesting as DabbleDB is, I cannot imagine trading Filemaker in for it. DabbleDB and QuickBase are hosted web apps. This can be great if you need to collaborate with distant colleagues. But if you are just dealing with your own data there are some significant downsides. I wish there was a native desktop app version of DabbleDB. I’d be happy just to be able to run the DabbleDB web app on my personal laptop.

For more on the trade-offs between hosted versus local apps, see: hosted vs. local computing.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping that Filemaker, or another plucky upstart builds a new generation, desktop-based generalist database product.

Readers: If you know others involved in working on generalist databases, please forward this article. The URL is: http://stealthisidea.com/articles/dabbledb-thoughts/

Wikipedia + Launchbar = Information at Your Fingertips.

Accessing Wikipedia is greatly facilitated thanks to LaunchBar. As if a king, I get to invoke vast chunks of human knowledge with just four keystrokes: [cmd-space]wp[space], plus a search term like, say, Scientology.

[Here is that search template if you want to add it to LaunchBar: "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=*"]

But Wikipedia does not yet answer a juicy meta-question: Who else is curious about this topic? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see how worldwide interest in topics like Islam, Intelligent Design or Louis Armstrong wax and wane as the events of the world unfold? This is the type of insight into what is on everyone’s mind, hitherto available only to the lucky few with access to search engine logs.

Wikipedia already has the raw ingredients of an amazing meme tracking tool: tons of traffic, tons of content, the ability to capture usage statistics. They need only a little chopping and sauteeing.

Here is a vision to steal for Wikipedia: Show how much interest this topic has garnered historically.

We’d like to be able to see, at a glance:

• How much traffic has this article been getting?
• What is the popularity trend? Spiking? Declining? Flat? Over the short and long term?
• How much editing activity has it been receiving?
• How does it rank among all searches?

I’ll leave it to as a design research topic to play out how this might look. (Feel free to forward mockups my way.)
A couple of other requirements:

• The data would likely have to be normalized against the growth of general Wikipedia traffic so as not to confound the message.
• We’d want this information to be available proactively (without clicking) but without interferering with the content of the article.
• It’d be nice to be able to drill in deeper to discover the next level of information such as where in the world do people care about a given topic?

[What other interesting types of questions could be gleaned from analyzing Wikipedia traffic?]

Also: wouldn’t it also be nice to have a set of robust APIs, so researchers could go wild analyzing the cause and effect of human curiosity over time and geography? Software architects: how might you build such APIs and hook up a scalable traffic monitoring system to the open source MediaWiki (the technological foundation of Wikipedia)?

See also

• Google Zeitgeist, a form of meme tracker, scrubbed for your protection, that carries the fascinating message that pop culture is really popular. (And that I’m really out of touch with it.)
• Wikipedia statistics (such as they are)
• Overture keyword searching – enter keywords, see how popular they are with search engines today. (Then contrive ways to pepper your articles with the most popular phrases like “sharon stone” or “britney spears sculpture” or daylight savings”, in order to attract hits.)
• Google Trends is interesting. It lets you look up any search phrase, see its popularity over time and what geographies are most into it. The Colbert Report searches are bigger in Canada than in the USA. Digg is on the rise. Searching for Sex is especially popular in Islamic countries. [Update 5/16/06]

A recent NYTimes article, “With Popcorn, DVD’s and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home” describes the decline in moviegoing:

“With box-office attendance sliding, so far, for the third consecutive year, many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained – a change that will pose serious new challenges to Hollywood.”

The lack of certainty about the underlying cause is not helpful. When a business is in peril it must identify the right cause: the correct explanation leads to action that can save the business; the wrong explanation can lead to actions which hasten failure.

This problem is of interest to us because it’s an instance of a common strategic predicament: an established class of products is being threatened by the emergence of a new class of products. Is the newcomer merely a passing fad? Or is it a disruptive innovation that will render the incumbent obsolete?

We will look at these questions using our preferred tool for the job, Formal Needs Analysis. We will first deconstruct moviegoing into the the primary customer needs it satisfies, then consider how well those needs are met by the competitors, in this case TiVo-style DVRs, Netflix, the web and videogames. This will isolate the points of overlap, clarifying when the alternates are as good or better than the incumbent.

What needs are met by moviegoing?

To model moviegoing and its competitors, we’ve established a needs space of seven primary needs and four supporting needs. Primary needs are the key reasons people purchase a product. For movies, we have:

1. The need to escape – to temporarily get away from the incessant stresses and pressures of life.
2. The need to feel good – to be put in a happy mood, say after a difficult week.
3. The need for stimulation – to be raised into a heightened emotional & physiological state.
4. The need to learn things – to be left with the new knowledge or insight into the human experience
5. The need for social interaction – to feel connected with others.
6. The need for social status – to feel worthy within the social group. With respect to pop culture including movies, it feels good to be in-the-know and it feels bad to be left out of the conversation everyone else is having.
7. The need for fun – to have a good time in the moment.

In addition, there are these supporting needs. Supporting needs help the product fulfill its primary needs better. They are like salt to french fries: salt makes the food taste better, but you don’t buy you buy the fries soley for the salt. For moviegoing, we have the following supporting needs:

1. The need for affordability – other things being equal, the more affordable a product, the more desirable.
2. The need convenience - another cost the customer incurs is non-monetary — the logistical hassle in using it.
3. The need relevance - Relevance of a piece of content is how well it relates to you. When it comes to matters of taste or interest, different folks require different strokes. Thus for content, relevance is largely a function of the breadth of selection available.
4. The need for long experience – the persistence of the experience.

Let’s walk through each of these to see how movies and the newcomers compare. We’ve assigned rough scores from zero to three to each competitor in the table below for reference.

Primary needs

Summary of needs fulfilled by moviegoing and its comparison points, rated from 0 to 3

1. The need for escape

Movies do a good job of providing escape. A darkened movie theatre away from home, interesting characters and an intriguing plot can immerse the viewer in an alternate reality.

Netflix shows the same movies, but at home. This experience is not as immersive as in a theatre, but the gap is narrowed for those fortunate enough to possess a decent home theatre. TiVo or web surfing can provide escape for hours, but today’s best videogames provide immersion to such an extent that time flies.

2-4. The need to feel good, for stimulation, to learn things

The movie industry is adept at crafting films that play directly against different emotional needs. The need to feel good is literally matched by the Hollywood “feel-good” movies. The need for stimulation, both emotional and physiological, is provided by thrillers, sci-fi, action and suspense movies. The need to learn things is met by watching characters in dramas and by documentaries.

As for the comparison points, Netflix has the same content and thus the same potential, minus some points for the less immersive experience. TiVo loses points for commercial interruptions (skippable though they may be) and for lower audio/visual quality relative to DVDs. (We could have added a/v quality as a secondary need.) Videogames can be extremely stimulating. Web surfing may not exactly be emotionally stirring, but it has great potential to help anyone learn anything about anything at any time.

5. The need for social interaction

While watching a movie is itself passive and solitary, going out to the movies is social in multiple ways. Going through an experience with friends makes it more enjoyable and gives common references for future conversation. A crowded movie theatre also provides a lighter version of the mob experience common at sporting events or huge rock concerts. Finally, if we take moviegoing to include activities before and after such as travel, dinner and drinks, there is ample opportunity for personal bonding.

Watching the same movie at home with Netflix or TiVo is rarely as social. Videogames played alone are decidedly not social. But endless hours spent playing videogames with friends is a strong bonding experience.

6. The need for social status

Coolness points are gained or lost based on how up-to-date one is with the latest trends. The movie industry plays this up well, fostering the notion of the must-see movie. You just have to watch it (otherwise what good are you?).

But while watching every top movie may necessary for hipness, but it is not sufficient. No medium has a monopoly on conferring social status. One must also be up to date on the latest TV shows, sports standings, celebrity gossip, fashion, videogames, news, technology and blogs.

We can say that the Netflix movie, arriving in the mailbox months after the playground or water cooler chatter has moved on to something new, is not so hip anymore.

7. The need for fun

The prior needs don’t completely capture the overall feeling of fun and excitement of going out to the movies, so we included it as another dimension of need. It overlaps some of the others, but that’s okay; we are free to choose the dimensions that give us useful insight.

Staying home and watching TV or TiVo or Netflix isn’t quite as fun. But high quality videogames can still be an addictive blast.

Supporting needs

8. The need affordability

Moviegoing is expensive. Aside from the ticket cost there are ancillary costs of parking and dinner. TV, Netflix and videogames are far more affordable per hour of use, and thus they get betters scores on the need for affordability.

9. The need for convenience

Going out to see a movie incurs non-monetary costs of time and logistics. One must get to and from the theatre, park and wait in lines. Staying home is far more convenient.

10. The need for relevance/choice

The Matrix and A Room With a View are highly compelling for their respective audiences, and highly irrelevant to one another’s. When it comes to content, relevance is gained through breadth of choice. The movies offer just a couple of dozen choices at any one time.

Regular TV has dozens of channels, yet there is often nothing to watch. TiVo, on the other hand, filters through thousands of channel-hours a week, leaving the viewer with a concentrated set of extremely relevant programming. Netflix offers an impressive selection of 50,000 movies, old TV programs and special-interest content findable nowhere else.

As for videogames, there is not as yet something for everyone. Many have no interest in videogames at all.

11. The need for a long experience

The moviegoing experience, fun and immersive as it may be, is fleeting. On the other hand, people can spend hours a day with TV, TiVo, videogames and web surfing.

Conclusions & Predictions

Now that we’ve broken moviegoing and its challengers into its component needs, what can we make of all this? Is the bad fortune of moviegoing due to a passing spate of poor product? Or is it indicative of deeper, long-term trends to other media? By walking through the chart above we can lay out some specific conclusions and predictions:

• Moviegoing is still a unique product. Its needs profile — its row in the chart above — is distinct from the others. None of the alternatives are a superset. This suggests that moviegoing will not be obviated by new media (the way that word processors obviated typewriters), but will live alongside them.
• Moviegoing has specific advantages. It is a better escape than home media, more engaging and more social. A night of moviegoing is simply more fun than staying home and watching the same thing at home. First release movies are also trendy and confer social status on those who watch the blockbusters early.
• Moviegoing has weaknesses relative to its competitors. It is costly, both monetarily and in convenience. The home media is far more convenient. Moviegoing is also a fleeting, and leaves discretionary time for other products to fill. The comparison points, TiVo, videogames and the web can occupy the user for hours without extra cost.
• The competitors pose real and specific threats. Videogames are an excellent escape. Netflix and TiVo let the user select from thousands of choices, thereby greatly increasing the relevance and appeal. Videogames played with friends fulfill needs for social interaction.
• All of these dynamics are about the medium of moviegoing itself, not the content within that medium. The threat is systemic, not a result of a spate of poor movies.
• Video-over-the-net has the potential to meet a superset of the needs met by Netflix. Current offerings are of lower a/v quality and limited selection, but this can change. Once it does, the DVD-by-mail model will become niche.
• While moviegoing will persist, it won’t be without pain to the industry. The competition for discretionary time is hot, leaving less of the pie for the movies than they are used to. Movie attendance can be expected to decline, even if quality recovers.

How can the movie industry respond to these threats? I will save that for another article.

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For more on needs analysis, please see:

• Needs analysis technique at ProductVision.org
• Needs Analysis of Vehicles
  

Micropayments are a good idea. Today, providers of worthwhile content must make a difficult choice: do they charge for their content or for a subscription, knowing that a miniscule proportion of visitors will ever do so? Or do they give it away, hoping to fund their efforts via advertising? Micropayments will allow vendors to charge an amount small enough to be inconsequential to the buyer. If done in an unimposing and efficient way, they can open the floodgates to a torrent of impulse purchases.

How else can micro-payments be used?

Here are some scenarios:

• Content providers large or tiny could provide much of their content for free, convey how high their quality is, and charge a nominal amount for extra content.

• Pay to download: pay $0.50 and get a royalty-free photo, or a template or a sound or a font or a set of flash cards to study with.

• Web tools : charge per usage of speciality web apps, calculators, etc.

• New York Times: Read today’s editorialists, or any article from the archive for 5 cents.

• Video: Watch last night’s Jon Stewart without commercials for $0.50.

What are today’s precedents for micropayment user experience?

• Amazon’s One Click checkout – the ultimate enabler of impulse purchases

• Microsoft’s Passport: We know who you are and you’ve given us your purchasing credentials. When you log into a site you’re also all set up to buy something.

• PayPal: vendors, generate a button and stick it on your site. Visitors need only click it, authenticate, and be almost done with the purchase.

• iTunes Music Store: You’ve charged up your account in advance and can now make purchases based on it.

• BitPass seems to be on the right track. Their system is simple for vendors and for customers. [Anyone know how they are doing? Are there other more successful competitors?]

What are the ingredients for micropayments to thrive?

The concept of micropayments is not new, but after years it still hasn’t taken off. However the specifics play out, for micropayments to take off the systems need these characteristics. The absence of these factors has deferred the future explosion of micropayment.

• Standards and interoperability – Credit cards wouldn’t work if there were dozens of clearing houses and fragmentary usage among consumers. Desirous as we are for competition, we need a small number of standard providers of micropayment services for the concept to take off. If they can agree to interoperate it will be better for the entire market. (Think of SMS interoperability agreements that in Europe versus in the USA.) And as a natural consequence of any such market regulation will eventually be required to counterbalance the power of the monopoly or oligopoly.

• Tiny transaction fees – one penny for a five cent transaction, five cents for a 25 cent transaction. [Can someone tell me if there is a minimum transaction fee for credit cards?] Building up the infrastructure and demand will be expensive and we can expect impatient banks to want to recoup these costs quickly. And banks will walt to start from a price they can reduce later. Greed will kill the concept, however. Everyone needs to remember that the point is huge volume and no-brainer impulse purchases. (Steve Jobs understands this: consider his battles with the music industry to keep all songs at $0.99.)

• Instantaneous purchase. Avoids registration hassle with each vendor, a cost in its own right. Amazon’s one-click payment is the ultimate. Requiring authentication is the maximum amount of extra effort on the user’s part that would be imposed.

• Incubation time – Email is a pretty good idea, wouldn’t you say? But if you remember it took quite a while for it to catch on. Similarly it will take some time for consumers to get over the hump and fund micropayment accounts en masse. The more it catches on, the more it will catch on.

• Content worth purchasing – some think that micropayments will fail, then cite as examples things that are no more interesting than any random thing on the Internet. It will always be hard to sell such content in volume. Payments will work if the content is valued highly enough. The tricky part is getting users to trust that what they will get will be worth their dime as well as their time.

• Brand name sponsorship – There is an “activation energy” needed to get consumer over the hump and sign up for something new. A well-known, trusted brand needs to step up, offer something people want and put it behind a micropayment, to kick-start mass adoption. Notice Apple’s iTunes Music Store essentially did this, albeit with proprietary, Apple-only accounts and relatively large micropayments. People barely notice the new business model they are partaking in, and partaking in it they are, by the tens of millions. Similarly, for payment processors, a MasterCard or Visa will carry more trust and credibility than ElCheapoPayments.com.

• Anonymity – As a consumer, you have good reason to be concerned about what is being gathered about you over the course of decades of living online. (Expect this to come to a boil in the next few years.) Micropayments can do well without this need being addressed. But those establishing the standards now would do the whole industry a favor by offering consumers the peace of mind that the transaction is certifiably anonymous. Remember, the game is to maximize purchases by eliminating every barrier to purchase. Hopefully these factors will come together soon, so I can charge you a nickel or two to get in.

Visions to steal

What would a StealThisIdea article be without an idea or two to steal?

Vision idea #1: CMS and blog tool makers: integrate with micropayment infrastructure. Let bloggers indicate what content is paid and what is free. The visitor would see the title and excerpt of the article and a button: “Click here to continue reading. You will be charged 3 cents.” They click once and they’re in the article. Even better, facilitate Salon-style user choice between paying with loose change versus paying with a moment of your attention. On the server side, allow hits from search engines to get in for free once per day so they can index this valuable content and have it be findable by content.

Vision idea #2: Micropayment vendors and/or CMS & blog tool makers: set up referral incentives. So if B refers visitors to A’s page, B gets a cut of the take. Recommendations are important because the user needs to feel that what they buy will be worth paying for.

Vision idea #3: Micropayment vendors: provide web content vendors with a dynamic pricing model, where the cost adjusts itself automatically in response to demand. If a product sells well at 3 cents, raise it to 4, 5 and 6 cents, until total revenue — cost times volume — rate peaks out. The market could then value a piece of content dynamically and automatically.

Vision idea #4a: MasterCard and Visa: offer one-click web micropayments as an extension of credit and debit cards services. No special authentication is needed if you are using the same browser, say, transactions of 25 cents, up to $5 in purchases per month. Provide this service to millions of vendors as easily as PayPal does to its. (In other words, no merchant account required.) Micropayment totals are included on the regular credit card bill. This space is just waiting to be owned!

Vision idea #4b: PayPal: provide a special "instant payment loop" to content providers. The user would see a PayPal version of the "click to view. It will cost 5 cents" entry point. Present the customer with an option to buy with one click from this browser, to a maximum amount.

Vision idea #5: Web publishers and CMS tool makers: Once the user has bought two or three articles at 5 cents each, they may be reluctant to keep buying. Rather than charging 5 cents to view every single premium article, consider charging 15 cents to view all premium articles for a day. To be even more customer-focused: automatically top out daily expenditures per user once they’ve reached the daily rate. And stop collecting money from a user once they’ve hit the annual subscription maximum of $25. This is radical and the opposite of pricing theory. Th point is to experiment with the pricing mechanics to minimize the customer’s discomfort.

[Readers: got other ideas?]

Other reading

• Jakob Nielson has argued for micropayments for ages and thinks they should have happened long ago.

• Not everyone agrees that micropayments will ever happen. Clay Shirky thinks that micropayments will always fail because they are simply an untenable idea. (Compare his reasoning with the ingredients to success above. I think he is missing the psychology of the impulse purchase.) He reaffirmed his belief as recently in 2003 and was lucidly rebutted by cartoonist Scott McCloud (whose book Understanding Comics is required reading for everyone).

My lazy rebuttal: what if Apple were to charge ninety-nine cents to download a song? Would they sell any music?

• There’s a worthwhile discussion of micropayments at MetaFilter.

• Commentary of 8/19/05 on Amazon’s micropayment scheme.

Updates

October 2005 – The New York Times has decided to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. I guess times are tough and they need more revenue. Their drastic response was to put their most popular content — their editorials — behind a new TimesSelect service that costs $50 a year. They will soon know whether this will pay off business-wise. Certainly their readership numbers will be slashed along with the powerful influence of its editorialists, who must be awfully sad at the loss. It would have been interesting to see them experiment with a micropayment scheme or at least a Salon-like forced ad choice. I expect they will.

Online newspapers like the New York Times have been around now for ten years and this need to preserve and reconstruct the experience of a moment in time remains unfulfilled.

If newspapers see it as part of their mission to serve as a historical record, they will appreciate that the record it is not just the a database of articles, but how the articles are packaged and presented.

(This is an instance of how, in the transition to new technology, some needs get left behind. It’s also an instance of how the benefits of paper are perennially overlooked in the transition to online media. It doesn’t have to be this way, but avoiding it first requires appreciation for what is taken for granted, and compensation in the new system.)

Vision to steal

�ĢNewspapers: let the user recreate the experience of viewing the paper on any historical day, both hard-copy and online versions. Let the user step through changes made within a day, or over subsequent days and weeks to see how coverage of a story unfolded over time. This would let the papers squeeze more value out of their historic content, while providing a useful resource to readers and researchers. Businesswise, they might do it either out of the kindness of their hearts, or to make some change by encircling the historic front pages in advertising. Or they may provide such a service to promote the purchase of articles that require payment.

• Content management system (CMS) vendors: differentiate from their competition and provide reconstruction of the experience at any snapshot in time.

Questions for Readers

Which CMS’s are the most popular among online newspapers? Do any CMS’s provide this capability?

See also:

• Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you punch in a URL and see historic snapshots of it. Here is the NY Times on 9/11.
• Newseum.org has front pages of print newspapers on important historical days. [Update 2/6/06 courtesy David Cortright]

As anyone who’s had to remove one’s shoes at airport security knows, there is a trade-off between security and convenience. But by trying to make email security perfect, it has been made too complex. Email encryption is out of reach of regular users, leaving them with no security at all.

In this article we will discuss who should care about secure email and isolate the reasons why it’s still not commonplace. Then we’ll describe a vision for a radically simpler approach that can clear the path for mass adoption.

Should we be concerned?

Should unencrypted email be a concern? Yes, and here are some reasons:

• Email is transmitted in the clear. Email has been aptly compared with sending a postcard through the mail. It travels through multiple store-and-forward systems before reaching the recipient. Anyone with access to any of the systems along the way can read it.
• WiFi is unsafe: WiFi traffic including email can be intercepted using hacking tools available to any teenager (as this CNN article describes).
• Email accumulates. Every email you send and receive, over the course of years can be stored indefinitely and searched instantly. GMail and Yahoo! Mail already provide gigabytes of storage. [Readers: How strong are the laws forbidding this type of filtering and capture of email?]
• Email interceptions are not detectable. We have no way of knowing what happens to our bits as they filter through the Internet. We can’t tell who is collecting or filtering through it. But what we do know is not comforting.

What are the use cases?

Concern over intrusions is not just for libertarians and the paranoid. Here are some key scenarios, represented as SSNiF scenarios:

Why hasn’t email encryption caught on yet?

If the need for encryption is so high, how did we get from 1985 to 2005 without it being as common as the CC: line? In fact, encryption capabilities have been in the email clients for years. Why has it not caught on? There are a combination of factors:

• Consumers are not aware that they need it. The risks of having one’s email intercepted are nebulous. “Can email realistically be intercepted? I don’t have anything to hide. What could really go wrong? I don’t know of anyone being hurt by this.” Until there are a series of highly publicized cases, the issue is not likely to hit the radar of most honest consumers.
• Corporate IT officers don’t seem to know they need it. Although it’s common for corporations to establish VPNs, limit WiFi usage, provide shredder bins and require passwords to be changed every couple of months, protecting sensitive information from being exchanged over the open Internet is rare. Executives seem to not understand how much sensitive information is left exposed through this path (at least until they get a demo from a company like Vontu).
• There haven’t been high-profile cases of corporate or government email espionage to raise awareness. It’s hard to detect, and even when it is, companies are loathe to disclose such security violations, which are disconcerting to customers and shareholders. [Readers, do you know of any good cases?]
• There are multiple chicken-and-egg problems. Consumers aren’t vocal about encryption so vendors don’t provide it (especially in a consumer-friendly way). There are zillions of different email systems in use, some which have encryption, many of which don’t. All will need to become interoperable before it becomes mainstream. Fortunately, it looks like an industry standard has been established: S/MIME.
• The network effect hasn’t kicked yet in. As with the telephone, fax machines and instant messaging, encrypted email becomes more compelling as everyone around you gets it. It has yet to reach this tipping point.
• Nobody has forced it. Encryption would gain a foothold if a critical mass of companies and government agencies were to mandate its use. Bold policies, such as bouncing all non-encrypted messages off either side of the firewall, would accelerate adoption.
• The end-user experience is too complex. Anyone who attempts to set up encryption will be left with the conclusion that it is way too complex for consumer-level use. The parents of encryption are the fields of mathematics and security, both highly technical fields not renown for their sympathy for mortal users. Even Apple’s mail.app is not very easy to set up. (If you want to do so, here are the best instructions I found for Mac users. Here are instructions for Outlook 2000).

Because email encryption has not yet been done simply, there is an assumption that it is intrinsically complicated. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Why is encryption so difficult today?

The pioneers of encryption have poorly prioritized the use cases. They allowed concerns for certification to complicate the more fundamental need for encryption. Certification (aka signing) is a solution to the use case of impersonation: someone maliciously posing as another person or company, fooling you into believing or doing something in their interest. Aside from scammers posing as PayPal, how often has someone tried to impersonate your coworker or family member? Perhaps official communications from financial institutions should be certified as a defence against phishing. But there is no need for casual email to be.

Secondly, obtaining encryption keys is a real burden. You must first validate with a trustworthy organization (like Thawte or Verisign) that you are who you say you are. As Microsoft puts it, “digital ID requires signing up with an independent certificate authority. To get a digital ID from a certificate authority, see Digital ID on Office Marketplace to find services that issue digital IDs.”

There is a far more immediate use case to solve: getting a message from person A to person B without anyone being able to gather and read it.

Vision to Steal : Build simple but powerful encryption into email clients

Rock-solid security comes at such a high cost of convenience that users settle for no security at all. For everyone to get on board with email encryption radical simplification is called for.

There are three parts to be simplified: 1. acquiring your own key pair, 2. trading public keys with those with whom you communicate, and 3. actually sending and receiving encrypted mail.

The third part is somewhat smooth once the first two are established, especially with Mac’s mail.app. If you create a message to someone for whom you have a public key, the message is automatically and transparently encrypted.

Visions to steal for vendors of email clients:

• Decouple the certification from encryption. Certifying email is more complicated than just encrypting it for the recipient’s eyes only. Regular users will always have trouble understanding what certificates are and why they are needed, while still needing to send protected email. This simplifying assumption makes the encryption problem tractable: it makes it possible to consumerize encryption technology so that casual users can trade sensitive information without having to learn or do a lot.
• Cut the abstract concepts and terminology that goes along with certificates, certificate authorities, signature validation, Digital IDs, Root Certificate Stores, etc.
• Let users generate encryption key pairs directly from the local email client for free, in two steps, so they don’t have to go out of their way to get it. Propose this as a default for everyone.
• Have email clients automatically request public keys from each other. (This is described in a separate article, Automatically exchanging public encryption keys.)

Visions to steal for webmail services: Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail, Google GMail:

• One of you, be the first to support encryption and make it easy to make key pair generation, encrypted email exchange and public key exchange as simple as it can be. (See: Hushmail) Store the messages securely at the server side and decrypt them on the client side (which probably requires a Java component).
• Process signatures on incoming messages now, so they can be used by financial institutions to cut down on phishing.

For PIM makers and standards-bearers like vCard:

• expand standards to serve as the repository of public key fields, supplying them to email programs.

For IT infrastructure vendors:

• build gateways that block unencrypted email from passing through the firewall. Make it hard or impossible for employees to send unencrypted email outside the corporate walls. Force external partners to encrypt email to get it through.

Notes

• The Blackberry encrypts data from the handheld device to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server installed within the corporation. Messages that are destined outside the corporation get decrypted before leaving. The Blackberry supports S/MIME as of 2004. [True?]

More questions for Readers:

Communications security is a large, complex and dynamic field. Help me out here.

• Are there any corporations that insist that only encrypted emails pass through their firewalls?
• Does anyone know of reports of electronic dumpster diving, for corporate espionage? (I expect this to be extremely hard to detect without a whistle-blower.)
• Are there laws prohibiting interception of email? Do the email service providers promise they won’t dumpster dive in their legal agreements?
• How do we know there isn’t widespread email espionage going on? Are there cases that resulted in demonstrable material damages?
• Would authenticated/certified email really reduce the phishing epidemic? How?
• Are there countries or cultures where email encryption is commonplace?
• How come PayPal and other major institutions don’t already sign their emails?

See also

• Design to Steal: Automatically exchanging public encryption keys.
• S/Mime tutorial

[Update 8/21/08: Changed the old name "USN use cases" to "SSNiF scenarios"]