So you think social media is only for marketing and customer support teams

Even if you are a social media convert, you may be thinking that social media makes sense only for marketing and customer support teams. Employees can toil away using email and business software that you have in place.

That thinking is going to get you in trouble. Your customers are already empowered with powerful tools such as reviews, recommendations, information about problems with your products and deep insight into your issues. Your customers are sharing information with each other using sophisticated tools at the speed of light.

Your limited marketing team members and customer support people are no match for empowered customers, because your marketing team does not make the rules anymore. Customers do.

So, if you do not empower your employees with social media tools that enable them to share what they know with each other and learn from each other almost instantly, your workforce will look like a cavalry fighting an air force.  Can you really afford that?

A Lesson In Prototyping from Okhla Industrial Estate

This was many years back. I was a product designer fresh out of college with two international student design awards and a heady feeling about my career. I went to work for the federal government in New Delhi, India. My workplace was a very special multimedia lab, where I was given all the budget in the world to do what ever I wanted.

One of our projects was to design a device that can play analog video over digital screens. I was the industrial designer and was entrusted with product design. We were only making a few pieces. So we decided to build the case in Aluminium rather than spend money on expensive plastic moulding.

So after weeks of sketching and discussion with my colleagues, I took elaborate blueprints to Okhla Industrial area, where I had identified a mold maker. He was a modest man, with probably a few years of schooling. Since I had taken 6 months of engineering drawing lessons in school, and was very confident about my drawing skills, I took 30 minutes to explain all the details of my blueprint to him.

After listening to me patiently for 30 minutes, he said that he did not understand what I was talking about. My four years of engineering education and 2 years of graduate design school education did nothing to help the situation.

Watching my frustration, he sat me down and told me that the best way to convey a design is to make a model. I told him that I don't have a workshop to build him a model. He asked me to go to a stationary shop nearby and get some thermocole and a few razor blades. I followed his advice and built him a model in a hour. I identified several errors in my blueprint while building the model.

When I showed him the model, he nodded his head and told me that I will have my castings the next day.

If this experience sounds a lot like your two hundred page design specification that your engineering team did not "get", you may want to try to convey your design using a prototype rather than argue with them about how "they don't get it".

Who knows? May be you will realize your design spec is not perfect after all.

Thinking Mobile-First For Product Design

I am in the middle of a design project at work where we are designing enterprise applications for people management. As part of the project we went through our design research phase and built a web prototype. Once we completed the prototype, my colleague @MChewD asked me how the application will work for someone who does not have a computer or email, but carries a mobile phone and only uses one thumb to operate the application while standing somewhere.

It was an interesting challenge. So I decided to build every high level use case as a mobile application, even though there are no plans to release a mobile version of the application in the first release. It was the most interesting exercise I did this year.

1. Identifying the use cases became simpler
Thinking mobile first, helped me identify the key mental models I need to communicate to the product team. All I had to do was to wonder what a person will think about doing while he or she is walking down the corridor. For example, "Oh! I need to approve that expense report." or "I need to attend that training course". For more on mental models, the book by Indy Young is a great read. Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior

2. I was able to focus on the features that are absolutely essential.
Since the real estate available for me was limited, I was forced to think about the first thing a person needs to see when she launches the app. I was also able to focus on the main thing that the person must accomplish while in the app. Then I focused on the other 2-3 things the person can do while at the app. The limited real estate forced me to cut out everything that is not absolutely essential.

3. I was able to build small clickable prototypes in daily sprints
Since I was thinking about one problem and one problem only, I was able to sketch out the solution, discuss that with colleagues and build a prototype in one day.

4. The UI Design Conventions of the mobile client gave me a standard UI design framework.
I am not a User Interface designer. However, since I was using the UI framework provided by the mobile device, I was able to convey my ideas and thoughts without making any major interface design errors.

5. I avoided stepping on the toes of my User Interface Design colleagues
Since I was only building mobile prototypes, my UI design colleagues knew my intentions and understood that I was conveying a mental model rather than making an interface design suggestion.

6. It forced me to think about the details and identify gaps in my thinking
Because I had to build every screen of the prototype, I was forced to think about the steps involved in the process. I could not cheat, overlook or get lazy with my design. I had to take a stand, define it and be preparde to defend it.

I used Axure to create the prototypes and the mobile templates provided by Axure.

I recommend you give it a try. Thinking mobile-first may be a lot of work.  But I am sure you will have fun. By the way, this is a not a very novel concept. Some pioneering companies are already doing this.

Knowledge Management is less about harvesting and more about connecting

I spoke to several people executives about knowledge management recently. They all have major concerns about a significant portion of their workforce leaving their company and taking away critical undocumented or tribal knowledge with them.

They were not talking just about the creative classes such as scientists, engineers, designers and artists. This applies to all kinds of workers including employees of utility companies, manufacturing companies, mining companies and energy companies. Suddenly companies are realizing that everyone is a knowledge worker. All these workers create significant know-how and have a lot to share.

Companies typically take two approaches when they attempt to solve this problem.

Some companies want to harvest all this tribal knowledge and store it somewhere for access by new employees later. But the point is that new employees need to know the right questions to ask before they can make sense out of any harvested knowledge, even if such harvest is possible. Sometimes knowing the answer does not help, if you do not know the question.

Certain other companies take a different approach. Instead of harvesting all the knowledge and storing it in some place, they keep in touch with their alumni via technology so that they can contact them when required. Alumni are willing and glad to provide their knowledge, when required, for their former employers. 

The second approach is efficient and practical. Companies should invest money in technology that connects people, enable them to improve their knowledge and when required get the services of such employees for a fair fee. This is the sustainable approach.

Making the case for internal social media software to a CFO

The theory of the experience curve is based on the idea that the time, and hence cost, required to perform a task decreases as a worker and the organization gain experience.

Worker and organizational experience is gained by awareness, observation, conversation and experimentation. Traditional workplaces provide this awareness, observation, instruction and conversation a few times a year. This is, more often than not, done outside the context of day-to-day work.

For example, training programs are conducted a few times a year and performance discussions are conducted once or twice a year.

The theory of the experience curve also states that the more often a task is performed, the lower will be the cost of doing it. A task can be the production of any good or service. Each time cumulative volume doubles, value added costs (including administration, marketing, distribution, and manufacturing) fall by a constant and predictable percentage.

Workers and organizations with access to timely knowledge from trusted sources will provide services and produce goods faster and in a more efficient manner. Until recently, social interactions to share and gain such knowledge was limited by constraints imposed by geography, time and to some extent technology. This is not the case any more.

Social media tools in the workplace enable a worker to share what she is  doing or thinking effortlessly. They enable a supervisor to be aware of what others are doing without interrupting their work. Social media tools enable a worker to keep track of everyone she cares about at work and interact with them more frequently. Awareness is high, conversations are made in context , observation is keen, feedback is rapid, and experimentation is frequent.

A social media platform, enables synchronous and asynchronous connections and spreads the body of knowledge, through people who know and trust each other. The experience and confidence of the organization as a whole, not just the workers, increases exponentially.

So when a company that has a social media platform for its workers, competes with another company without one, all other things being equal, the former will make more money.