Only slightly bent

On a semi-work-related task, I’ve played around with Google’s Nexus One “superphone” for a while to get a feeling what the Google guys are delivering. As is the tradition with my light-reviews, some positives and negatives I discovered include the following:

The Good

• It’s a well-constructed a good-looking device. Build quality seems to be good and the back cover material is nice “soft” plastic.
• The screen is gorgeous and the home screen UI is nicely customizable with widgets and the cute but gimmicky Live (animated and interactive) wallpapers.
• Google services are, unsurprisingly, very well integrated to the phone experience. Another plus is the existence of Google applications like Google Goggles that are not yet available on other platforms.
• While the Google Market is not exactly up to par with Apple’s App Store in either quality or breadth of content, there are plenty of nice applications available.
• One of the most important built-in “productivity” apps, the calendar, works well. It’s much better than, for example, the iPhone’s.
• Something I wasn’t quite sure of at first was the presence of a trackball below the touch screen; it feels like strange import from Blackberries, where I don’t particularly like it. Now, the trackball isn’t strictly needed for anything really, but it turns out it is useful in some situations for an alternative selection/scrolling device – and it allows for better one-handed usage of the phone than what would otherwise be possible. I still say it’s a bit of an oddball feature, but I’m veering towards it being a neutral or even a good rather than a bad thing.

The Bad

• The scrolling is a jerky all around; in home screen, in the browser, maps, everywhere. Considering the amount of CPU power at its disposal, I found this rather surprising. The iPhone 3GS scrolls much smoother, despite being significantly behind in available processing power.
• The UI is sometimes frustratingly unresponsive. The soft buttons at the bottom of the screen are probably the worst part; they often have to be pressed twice or more or more heavily for the push to register. This is highly annoying and significantly degrades the user experience.
• When the phone is locked, the only way to light up the screen is to press the power button. Pressing the trackball doesn’t do anything.
• While the home screen is customizable, the idle screen unfortunately is not. Nor does it show the next calendar entries.
• The camera, while better than the iPhone’s, is of rather poor quality. It still continues to puzzle me how my 3-year-old N82 can beat most or all of the top-end smartphones in terms of camera performance.. Do people really not use the cameras or why are such crappy cameras deemed good enough?

Overall? Good work from HTC and Google. Solid first entry into the market. On its own it is not a “killer” device, but give Android, Google and HTC a year or two to polish everything – which I hope they’ll do, rather than just pile on features – and we should be looking at some seriously good devices.

After being a 100% Nokia-user for almost 15 years, I bought myself an Apple iPhone 3GS some months back – primarily because the Nokia N97 is weighed down by the legacy of Symbian and the Nokia N900 doesn’t have 3G support at 850MHz, the best 3G network around here. I was initially hesitant on making the switch, but quickly realized I should’ve switched earlier. The iPhone simply offers a good user experience. After some months of usage, here are some observations:

The good

• The browsing experience; it’s simply great.
• UI responsiveness is in a class of its own; scrolling is ultra-smooth throughout (smoother than on many Snapdragon-powered newer phones) and things just feel responsive.
• The touch screen, as far as capacitive touch screens go, is very sensitive, accurate and responsive. Even typing works surprisingly well on the virtual keyboard. The screen resolution is a bit on the low side for a modern high-end smartphone, but is sufficient for most uses.
• The availability of a huge selection of applications and the convenience of the App Store; as I have noted earlier, while the App Store interface is not very good, the existence of a single repository for all apps and simple, quick purchase & installation process makes for a good user experience. And there are some excellent apps – so good that they could play a role in the device selection. I will highlight a few in a later post.
• The seamless switching to WLAN access whenever one is available works very well and makes for a good user experience, especially in locations with “known” access points like at home or at work.

The bad

• The camera. While it takes decent video, the photo-quality and user experience is downright terrible. My three-year old N82 easily trumps the iPhone in photo quality.
• Non-customizable idle screen; I want widgets or at least some level of customization for the idle screen. With the iPhone, all you can change is the background picture. The idle screen doesn’t even have upcoming calendar events for crying out loud.
• Some UI idiosyncrasies and limitations; for example there is no splitting of the SMS conversations; I would like to be able to cut off a conversation and start a new one with the same person instead of having all the messages to one person in a single list that eventually grows too big anyway. And there’s not even a good way of archiving the messages to a “saved” folder or anything.
• No Flash support. It’s sometimes annoying as many websites use Flash, but most of the time it’s not a huge deal – YouTube being supported by its own application helps.
• E-mail interface could be better. It’s good as it is, but has some annoying little things: for example, switching among multiple accounts takes too many clicks and GMail conversations show up as individual e-mails.
• The calendar UI is actually quite bad. Adding an entry is far too complicated and it’s missing a week-view!
• No multitasking. I used to consider this a deal-breaker, but I’ve learned to live with the lack of multitasking quite well. A working notifications infra helps a lot.

All in all – and despite the lengthy negatives list above – I am more than happy with it. The iPhone has certainly increased my time spent using a mobile device – it’s a device that’s a pleasure to use. It most certainly suffers from some deficiencies, as noted above, but the positives outweigh the negatives.

Depending on what Apple comes up with later this year, however, my next phone in 18 months’ time might or might not be an iPhone; I have lately been quite impressed by the newer Android devices like Google’s Nexus One. Give it another year or two to mature and we’ll have an interesting competition on our hands. And the Intel/Nokia MeeGo might end up surprising in a couple of years time as well. But today? The iPhone still wins in the user experience sophistication and simplicity – i.e. the stuff that matters the most to most people.

It’s been a while since I last played with a completely new phone platform, so I was semi-looking forward to getting a Blackberry Bold (9000) as my new work phone. As before, as the device has been reviewed by a zillion other sites already, I’ll focus on providing some personal experiences based on a couple of weeks of usage:

• The feel of the phone is very good; it’s quite heavy, but feels very solid and the build quality is top notch.
• The screen is gorgeous. I really like it. It could use a portrait feature or could generally be longer in the y-dimension, but it’s very nice.
• The browser is, unfortunately, not very good. So I tried the Opera Mini browser, but it turned out that sucked even more. So I’m back to the Blackberry browser which seems to display most mobile-optimized sites decently. The usability is just not very good.
• Strangely, getting email to work was a very painful experience. Not only that, but I think the email experience overall isn’t very good. There are several problems with it:
  * All emails from multiple sources end up going to the same inbox; I can have my GMail mails in their own place, but they also end up showing with my work mail scattered therein. That’s really confusing. Additionally, the GMail client just plain and simple refuses to work.
  * When you delete or move a mail on your mail account, it doesn’t get deleted or moved on the phone. Hence mail just piles up on the phone.
  * When you delete a GMail mail on the phone, it gets deleted (i.e. not archived) on the GMail account; there is no “archive” option
  * There is no “Mark all as read”-option.
• I could get used to a full keyboard on the phone. Once you learn to type on the tiny keys, it’s very convenient. Makes me think the next phone I buy for myself needs to have a keyboard.
• I’m not particularly impressed by the battery life; for some reason I thought Blackberry would be a little bit better in terms of battery life than other smartphones, but no. You need to recharge every day and what’s worse, charging the battery is darn slow.
• The user interface looks pretty enough – though thoroughly unoriginal – on the first level. But click on almost anything and you get a hideous MS DOS-like text-only interface that should really be taken out and shot. Settings etc are far from intuitive or usable and there are too many of them.
• There are several other usability issues also; for example the idle screen shows the number of missed emails and any overdue calendar notices in a small icon on top of the screen. However, one cannot click on these to get to the emails or calendar – instead you have to go through the normal menu structure or deal with the pop-ups.

All in all I suppose it’s a decent phone for business use, but I would certainly not buy one myself.

The next completed book on the subject of visual presentations on my to-read list was The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam. The subject is quite accurate; this is a book that tells you how to use visual aids to solve problems and does a pretty good job at it, too.

The book starts by quite appropriately debunking some of the myths that keep people from drawing; i.e. the familiar “But I can’t draw” and “I’m not a visual person” excuses. After those possible initial in-your-head restrictions, it’s off to work creating pictures. The book, as far as books come, is a very hands-on book, encouraging you to draw (by hand! not with a computer) the numerous examples.

Beyond the introductory chapter, the book is divided into three parts; Discovering Ideas, Developing Ideas and Selling Ideas. Along the way, several frameworks are developed to help categorize and remember what kind of visualizations are out there, what are the questions they need to answer and so forth. One of the most useful ones is the SQVID which helps decide whether a picture should be simple or elaborate (S), qualitative or quantitative (Q), explaining vision or execution (V), focus on individuals or comparisons (I) and whether it depicts change (D for delta) or as-is/status quo. SQVID combined with a list of different kind of visualizations provided, one can easily choose the most appropriate type of picture for most situations.

I found the Back of the Napkin to be a highly interesting and useful read. The frameworks it offered will most certainly come in handy in the future. One of the most interesting insights was at the end of the book; it is often forgotten was that a picture does not need to be so simple as to not require any explanation:

This brings us to the last problem in this book, namely, Is a problem-solving picture “bad” if it requires an explanation? After all, doesn’t the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” tell us that good pictures always stand on their own?
 
The answer is no. All good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but they do need to be explainable. It’s a rare problem-solving picture of any sort that can carry a clear message, convey powerful meaning, and inspire deep thoughts without at least a caption. [..] the point isn’t to replace all the words; the point is to use a picture to replace those words that are more effectively conveyed, understood, and remembered visually.

All in all, highly recommended for most problem solvers. Btw, the book also has a website at http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/ along with some convenient downloadable “cheat sheets” for the presented frameworks.

Bob Sutton has become one of my favorite management book authors. This particular book – Weird Ideas That Work – How to Build a Creative Company – deals, as the subject suggests, with some more practical advice on how to build a creative and innovative workplace. It’s a relatively straightforward book in the sense that the bulk of the book consists of 11½ ideas in 12 chapters that many, especially the more conservative managers, may find weird.

How weird? Well, Sutton tells you, for example, to:

• Hire people who make you uncomfortable, even those you dislike
• Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers
• Find some happy people and get them to fight
• Avoid, distract and bore customers, critics and anyone who just wants to talk about money
• Don’t try to learn anything from people who seem to have solved the problems you face

Just how weird they are depends on your point of view. In any case, unless you’ve studied innovation processes more, at least some are likely to come off as somewhat strange and counter-intuitive. However, as also stated in the title, the ideas work; there is extensive literature and research to support these ideas. While much of the actual research can be found via the references, Sutton does give plenty of examples where possible and appropriate.

One important thing to keep in mind when reading – and especially when implementing – the advice in this book is that it’s meant as helpful stuff for creative or innovative companies. You do not – I repeat DO NOT – want to implement these things in a place that needs rigid adherence to a standard process or extreme repeatability. What’s also worth bearing in mind is that while the result is likely a more innovative company, it will not be the kind of place all people enjoy working in. It will also mean, with high likelihood, that you fail more. While that may sound bad, it’s only natural because a high success rate means you’re probably not very innovative. I quote a quote of James March from the book:

Unfortunately, the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones – and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not heroes of organizational transformation.

How about the downsides of the book itself? Well, having read quite a bit on innovation, many case studies easily get repetitive. I for one am getting tired of hearing the same examples over and over again; for example, whenever the best innovative companies are discussed, there is IDEO. There’s also 3M and the stories of microreplication and Post-It notes. Other ubiquitous companies are Apple, IBM and Intel. Don’t get me wrong; they’re all great companies that make for inspiring examples, but enough is enough.

Overall Weird Ideas That Work is a wonderful book that’s a quick and interesting read. What I particularly liked is that it’s comparatively down-to-earth in the sense that there is plenty of actually implementable advice in the book, not just some kind of ethereal ideas. While an analytical person might hope for some more proof that these ideas actually do work, with enough background information you realize that they in fact are highly likely to work. But again with the caveat that you should only try these if you want to increase innovation in your company or unit and are also prepared to deal with the negative consequences. But as they say, “no pain, no gain”.

As a summary I can highly recommend this book to at least 95% of the companies who claim to be innovative (and these days, who doesn’t?) – but fall far short of a actually being truly innovative.

Even though I know core competencies shift, I was somewhat surprised to find myself reading this book with precisely that in mind: developing a core competence. It has indeed come to the point when giving presentations is actually an important part of what I do, so I figured the least I could do is become the best possible presenter. Though I’ve had some training on the topic, this book - slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte – was to be one more stepping stone on that road.

An easy way to say what slide:ology is would be to say that it covers everything you need to know about creating presentations. But that’d be a cop-out, even though it does include a wealth of material that very few presenters have ever thought but should think about. There’s seriously a lot of stuff in the book; from choosing color palettes to designing slide layouts to displaying data to the placement of various elements, all wrapped with an array of design hints and case studies. Even dissecting the life and mood of different fonts is covered, so there’s certainly a feeling that everything you need is there.

But then there are also problems. One issue comes from the author; it’s clearly a book by a designer. This is not a bad thing as such, of course, but it means some elements in the book are more likely to be just personal preferences or styles of the author. It also means a near-complete lack of technical advice on how exactly to accomplish the stated ideas. Other problems come in the form of resources; following every advice in the book will require a team of people working on your presentation full-time. Al Gore may be able to afford that, but most other people in the day-to-day business life cannot. As a result, it can be hard to not feel discouraged when you consider the real-life resource and time constraints you have to live with.

Having said that, slide:ology most certainly earned a spot in my reference library and is a book I’m sure to return to when creating presentations. The book reads well, there’s a plethora of useful information and rules of thumb and some nice examples. And make no mistake, 99% of the people, myself included, would benefit from implementing even a fraction of the advice in slide:ology in their presentations.