Category: Design

3. SHELF it · Business · Design

BR 285: The Secret Lives of Customers by David Scott Duncan

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Category: 3 – SHELF it (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)

Comments: This book attempts to bring the idea of “Jobs to be done” to life with a story about a company that lost its way as it pursued hyper growth. It was an interesting read and one that I might come back to as I figure out how to apply “jobs to be done.”

Insights that resonated: 

(1) Customers hire our products to get specific jobs done – the more we understand these jobs, the more success we’ll find building the right solutions.

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · Business · Design · Psychology

BR 280: Competing against Luck by Clay Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David Duncan

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Category: 3 – SHELF it (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)

Comments: Competing Against Luck is intended to be an introduction to the “Job to be done” framework. It was an interesting read – however, it was less sticky than I hoped.

Insights that resonated: 

How do you figure out the job to be done? It involves asking 5 questions –

  1. What progress is that person trying to achieve? (Functional, social, emotional)
  2. What are the circumstances of the struggle?
  3. What obstacles are getting in the way of the person making progress?
  4. Are consumers making do with imperfect solutions or cobbling together hacks?
  5. How would they define what quality means and what trade-offs are they willing to make?
1. Read ASAP! · Book Review Actions · Book Reviews · Creativity · Design · Novel Concepts and Interesting Research · Technology

BR 249: Alchemy by Rory Sutherland

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Category: 1 – Read ASAP! (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)

Comments: Book of the year. It’s impact on me was as follows – every time I hear someone say “that makes sense – should work” or something similar, I stop in my tracks and remind myself that things that the idea that things that make sense should work is a falsehood.” Alchemy has put in a reminder as strong as any that things that work don’t need to make sense and that a dash of alchemy is often what we need to solve problems. In that sense, its impact on me was profound.

Top 3 Lessons: 

1. The opposite of a good idea is often a good idea. The most successful supermarkets post recession were either really cheap or really expensive. Luxury brands work. So do mass market ubiquitous ones.

2. The Earl of Sandwich asked for a type of food that would allow him to eat without leaving the gambling table. The sandwich since has received mass adoption. But innovation happens at the edges. Not for the average user.

3. Why do we have reason? So many animals have survived just fine without it and evolution doesn’t plan for the future and predict reason will be necessary for us to send someone to the moon. One interesting theory is that we developed reason as a way of justifying our actions to others – a necessary investment in a legal and PR department in a highly social species.

It is honestly really hard to bring this down to a top 3.

3. SHELF it · Book Review Actions · Design

BR 243: Microinteractions by Dan Saffer

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Category: 3 – SHELF it (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)

Comments: An interesting book on the importance of getting the small details in Ux design right.

Top 3 Lessons:

1. When microinteractions are done well, you get to design “signature moments” – e.g. “You’ve got Mail.”

2. The more frequent the microinteraction, the more visible it should be.

3. The best, most elegant, microinteractions are often those that allow users a variety of verbs with the fewest possible nouns. E.g. users can enter any credit card and the field auto detects which one it is (versus asking users to select a credit card first).