Doubt and inertia are the big enemies of corporate innovation

Now that I’ve been working in an innovation group for a couple of years, I’ve learnt a lot not just about what innovation means but also the powerful forces in an organization that stifle its ability to thrive. Top of the list, it strikes me, are doubt and inertia.  

Doubt is a major weak point for every fresh idea. It’s always easy to point out potential flaws and uncertainties about something new. It only takes one “we tried something like that and it falied” or “we can’t be sure it’s going to work” to give people pause. Innovation is about doing something different and risky, which means a leap of faith is required, and a willingness to put aside doubts.

Inertia is the comfortable place that’s safe from change. Change means making more effort, and forcing yourself to break out of easy habits. Nobody likes figuring out unfamiliar situations and the discomfort of strange territory, but doing so is an inherent requirement of innovation.

What makes these tricky subjects to deal with are that they aren’t particularly conscious choices. People usually want to see themselves as forces for positive action, and open-minded to fresh ideas. However, faced with the reality of innovating, people’s habits and instincts are what raise the doubts and preserve the inertia that they are most comfortable with. 

The problem with the size of the iPad

The iPad, despite its slender profile and newer lighter incarnations, is a beast. Hold it in your hand for more than a few minutes and you’ll start looking for something to lean it on. I found a simple rubber band grip called a Padlette that helps a lot given the size and weight, but really this not how I want to be holding my iPad. In contrast my dearly loved Kindle Keyboard is light as a feather and much more ergonomic for my holding. I can easily stand on the train with my Kindle in one hand and read for 20 minutes, free of any attachments, but not so my hefty iPad. 

The point I want to make isn’t really about the obvious size and weight issues though. I want to argue that Apple had no choice but to make the iPad so big: One of the best things you can do with it is browse the web, but most websites have been built on the assumption of a 1024+ pixel screen that allows for all kinds of junk to be packed on the page. I’ve recently been admiring the Sephora.com redesign for example, which is very clean and clearly inspired by tablet experiences. However, they are still burdened with 10 year old conventions of web design that consider it fine to load up the header of the page with lots of fussy little navigation elements. 

So many websites are still working on the assumption that users would rather pick through lots of little menu elements that you have to have a big screen to have any ability to use it. Even on the iPad’s large, luscious display it can get very fiddly pressing on the login link in the header or some other intricately crafted navigation scheme. The irony occurs when a website decides to deliver you the mobile version on the iPad, and although it feels over-simplified for the large screen, it is a glorious relief to not be sifting through the fussy details of a standard web design.

I just hope it won’t take too long before website designers wise up and start designing with simple, bold strokes that suit a tablet, and Apple will be able to comfortably size down the screen to something more desirable.

More Excited By Siri Than Tablets

A few months ago you would have noticed my gushing posts about the iOS style of UI, and tablets as a from of personal device, being the future of computing. While I still believe that, I must grudgingly concede that it’s going to take a long time before I can shelve my hefty laptop. I’ve really tried to pull together Keynote decks and Pages documents and concept wireframes on my iPad, but anything that requires a little finesse is just impossible. The tools for moving and editing shapes in Keynote are incredibly awkward. It’s like FPS games used to be on games consoles, where it took years for them to figure out the right way to use a thumbstick to control your viewpoint. Shifting drag handles or objects around on the iPad is painful, but I’m pretty sure they’ll eventually figure it out.

Siri may be the thing to really watch, however. While the simplicity of pulling up a contact and making a call on iPhone was a revelation a few years ago, the total effortlessness of asking Siri to call a contact is completely revolutionary. If tasks like moving objects around on screen can be done without even touching a UI, my agonizing about drag handles will be just plain irrelevant.  It’s related to the search boxes that have appeared in iOS: I don’t have to think about where to find a program of file if I can just type it’s name in the search at the top right; I don’t have to remember where the menu item is if I can just type it into the search box under Help. The importance of those little thoughtless moments can’t be underestimated.

I’m going to predict that when people look back from 2020, they’ll say the real revolution was ditching GUIs and letting the devices figure it out for us. On the other hand, tablets will just seem like a different shape of computer.

The ‘fail forward’ fallacy

You’ve probably heard about Fail Forward as one of the ways to reshape your culture for more innovation (take this list for example). I’m not buying it though.

I’ve been starting to doubt it for a couple of months. It’s such a mainstay of innovation thinking, but I’m starting to seriously question it for the following reasons.

It is often couched as ‘follow your dreams, just make sure you don’t spend too long on it if it’s a bad idea’ which actually sounds irresponsible to me. I don’t think people should run with any random project, idea or pipedream. Use consumer research to find unmet needs or brainstorm 100s of ideas and filter them down by potential and desirability.

If you look at the case studies in Lean Startup (I’m a fan) and the notion of pivoting, they didn’t just fail and move on, they kept working on their product. Instead of seeing setbacks as failing they pivoted their product concept at the appropriate level, based on what they learn through experiments and iterations.

Nobody wants to admit failure, especially not at work. It might sound good when you think of it for other people but when are you personally OK about saying you’re a failure and that you failed? We can be more honest about what we’ve truly succeeded at, but I’m really skeptical about anyone ever getting comfortable with calling themselves a failure.

Incentivizing failure is a bad idea! I’ve yet to hear an effective way to incentivize the ‘fail forward’ approach.

The only time in the innovation work I’ve been doing at Gannett when we do something akin to failing forward is during early concept testing, a small moment in the overall process when we want to sift through many ideas quickly and learn from the ones we’re shelving.

Recently I heard someone say ‘having innovation in your job title dooms you to failure, because people’s expectations will always be unrealistically high’. I feel similarly about this: Anyone who tries to convince their organization that they need to ‘fail forward’ is doomed in their efforts for the above reasons.  I think we’re better off skipping this one and focusing on better ideas for growing a culture of innovation.

Prototyping Is A Process of Self-Discovery

Iterative prototyping takes you on a journey of evolution and refinement that may lead you to totally redefine your initial product concept. While the process leads you to knead and reshape the product, it’s also a journey of self-realization for many people.

The most readily apparent is the moment when your dearly held preconceptions about the product are dashed during user testing. It’s hard to let go of ideas you are personally in love with, but when the overwhelming evidence from user testimony is that the idea won’t work, you have to let it go.

Self-discovery also comes in a subtler form through putting your concept into the world and learning that the way you actually conceived of it and framed it was lacking. When we put a language translation prototype into a realistic situation, factors such as eye contact, social graces and nonverbal cues turned out to be major considerations – and less so the product interface that had been obsessively crafted. We also found that the conversational moments that most needed translating weren’t ones that the device was really capable of providing effectively. Revelations such as these are exactly what you’re looking for in user testing, and don’t just change the prototype but also your mental model of the concept and how you need to define it.

Should We Replace Checklists With Rituals?

Last year our office was abuzz with checklists – for the team, for a project, for each step in our innovation process – and they have been an excellent tool for keeping our activities consistent and focused without the burden of bureaucracy. Checklists excel at parsimony; They whittle down the points of importance to the very least they need to be, thereby making your use of them more efficient.

Consider this though: While the checklist helps you get through the activity/list/whatever with economy, how does it keep alive the important nuances of each step? Even the most carefully worded checklist item will have difficulty capturing a handful of considerations in a few words. This is where rituals have potential to do better.

A while ago, we visited Arlington National Cemetery with friends and watched the changing of the guard there. The closest I’ve got to the military is playing Call of Duty on a games console, so bear with my description here. What fascinated me about the guard-changing was that this ceremonial ritual was deeply practical. The guards didn’t just bow, salute and switch places, but in fact each movement was a carefully considered motion that they would need to do in real guard post situations. The pacing, facing and standing were optimised versions of watching and staying alert in a space. The inspection of the arriving guard’s gun was a comprehensive check that the gun was properly set up and working. Anyone who knew this guard-changing ritual was equipped with all the best actions to perform the role, with detailed nuances about how to perform each part.

So how about turning checklist moments into rituals? We have a set routine – fully checklisted – for running a brainstorm. But what if it were a ritual, encompassing not only the steps to prepare and run the activity but also to shape the moderators behaviour and interactions with the brainstormers.

Admittedly a ritual requires a time investment for learning that doesn’t exist for a checklist – someone has to teach you the ritual and show you the unique nuances that are embedded in the ritual. This may not be a bad thing if you think about the interpersonal value of the learning session, the potential for the ritual to become handed-down from one person to another, and the scope for individuals to add their own personal touches.

Finally, and what may be most interesting of all, is that unlike the checklist, the ritual offers the chance to bring art and culture to something simple and formulaic. Guard duty as a checklist may simply be defined as series of walk-stand-look commands, but guard duty as a ritual is a sophisticated, nuanced performance that transcends the basic requirements.

Designing an immersive iPad reading experience

I’ve recently been designing an iPad app and thought it would be interesting to relate the principles that came to govern the user experience design:

We quickly noticed that the type of experience characterized by hierarchical menus and tapping through trees of information felt mentally laborious and aesthetically tedious. Looking at apps like Flipboard we found the flow of swiping from one feature to the next to be mentally undemanding and important for not breaking you out of the browsing and reading immersion. So a core principal of the experience became about building effortless flow from one item to the next. We approached this through making the swipe gesture the primary interaction: one item swipes to the next, lists are a swipe-through experience, and even supplementary information is a swipe-in from off-screen. Each moment that you’re not tapping and decision-making feels like an easy, onward flow.

The obvious thing would be to have a page-turn animation for when you move between content or a web-like live build of content on the screen. However, we steered clear of both because the live build was far less polished than an iPad app seemed to deserve and the page-turning seemed overdone and uninspired in a lot of magazines transitioning from offline to iPad. Instead we saw an opportunity to add delight through movement. Building on Apple’s toolbox of transitions and animations, we wanted elements to glide into and out of position in synchronicity. With the ultra-simplified content layout (no web-style headers, footers, menus) there were typically two or three major content sets on the page that could flow onto the page with a lightly orchestrated rhythm, or visual ballet.

We went through a number of prototypes to understand what this experience should look like, a few of which were before the iPad launched. As always, these started out as pencil-and-paper sketches, but as the importance of transitions, animations and flow became apparent we need a tool to bring flat layouts to life. Surprisingly, the tool that helped most for prototyping was Keynote. As a quick way to put a visual flow concept together it was surprisingly effective – using the built in flows and transitions an animated experience concept could be flesh out in just a couple of hours.

Inevitably the app may not quite reach the ideal of the concept, but so far it’s looking to live up to a lot of what I’ve outlined here, despite the brutal limitations of the iPad’s memory and processing power.