While we may mock and laugh at the kind of briefing processes we find ourselves in as designers, it is also shockingly pathetic how we choose not to do anything about it. Are we way too jaded? Is the process to change the process just not worth it?
Whatever it is, the situation you find yourself in, is probably just as much your fault as it is the client's.
If only more clients watched this video instead.. 'The Art of Web Design' by PBS.
It's a conversation I have with work colleagues, almost on a daily basis. They tell me that they were away from their desks for a couple of hours and came back to find 47 new emails in their inbox. "Why and how does this happen?", they ask.
My answer is simple. People are not only addicted to email but more importantly, they are utterly dependent like junkies are to crack, on the false feeling of having accomplished a task. A task completed by composing or forwarding some non-sensical pieces of jumbled words to someone else and contributing to their to-do list.
In the workplace, your inbox is your to-do list. And how awesome is it to know that you can forward a task that's landed on your list and be able to send it on to not just one other person, but to a whole team (or teams!). After you've hit the SEND button, you don't have to worry about that task ever again.. right??
To put it lightly, email is the cancer in your organisation. The quicker you rid of these toxic processes the better. I have 5 simple keys to help you drive this:
// Originally posted on Google+.
With Places being replaced by G+ Local over the past week, it's small businesses that are almost immediately forced into taking action.
Why? Subtle G+ links are starting to appear directly in the snippets of the businesses' official website results in the SERP - whether they like it or not.
But hey, what if the business had not yet bothered creating a page? No worries at all -- Google has automatically created one for you!!
In the case of Gelato Messina, a well-loved Sydney institution in Darlinghurst, Google is linking to one of these automagically created G+ pages (based on previous reviews on the now defunct Google Places platform). Furthermore, they will show you the 'Search Plus Your World' result on the right side of the results page, whilst relegating all other review sites like Urbanspoon and Eatability to the bottom portion of the page.
I'm fairly certain +Messina Gelato (which appears to be their official page) does not even know that this is going on right now. I will surely be looking on with keen interest on how this develops over the next few weeks.
Will businesses feel the need to come on board after completely freaking out from a test vanity search? Will they suck it up and rely on Facebook and Twitter to get the right information out? So many questions..
Originally posted on Google+.
People ask me all the time why I even bother checking in to places. There are several reasons why but the most compelling one is perhaps the really cool things you could do with all the rich data collected. And when guys like my good friend Mike can show me how to create videos of all the checkins in an amazingly clever way, the question soon becomes - why aren't others doing the same?
Last year, I went on an epic 9 week trip to the States and here you can see every single checkin from it. The video starts from 18 February and the last few days in Sydney before I fly out to Texas for SXSW and it ends at 24 June. The soundtrack switches every time I visit a new city.
If you want to have a go of it yourself, all the info is provided by Mike here: https://github.com/3px/Foursquare-Footprint
You might know by now that Baratunde Thurston, a tech-loving comedian is now a New York Times best-selling author with his book 'How To Be Black'. He is also the opening keynote speaker at SXSW 2012 which I'm quite excited about.
I came across this youtube of him presenting to a bunch of Googlers at Mountainview (the Black Googler network in fact) - he speaks of how the book came about, the processes in going from an amusing idea to becoming his life story. It's an hour long, but worthwhile if you want to get a good sense of who he is and what he is about.