Livescribe's Smartpen

I had the opportunity last week to have a live demo of Livescribe's Pulse SmartPen from Peter Hewitt, who is an advisor to Livescribe. What a great technology! The Pulse has a form factor of a large fountain pen, yet it contains a camera, a microphone, memory, and a USB interface. Think of it as a pen that can also record a conversation, seminar, or lecture. It syncs your notes with the audio, so once you're finished taking notes, you can point to a line in your notes, and it will play back the audio from that

Peter and I recorded an interview, where we talk about Macadamian's business model and the kind of work we do. He uploaded the notes to Livescribe's web app, where you can listen to the whole interview and see Peter's notes. You can even search on the text. Remarkable!

I ordered a Pulse immediately after our meeting. I could see it being incredibly useful in transferring knowledge throughout a project. How many times have you passed on your notes from a meeting to a colleague, only to realize you have no idea what one particular point meant, even though you're the one that wrote it? With Livescribe you can go back and listen to the audio at the exact moment you wrote the note. I'm starting to sound like an infomercial for the Pulse, so I'll leave it at that. Go check one out!

HTC Bets On Design

Interesting piece of news this week - HTC bought One and Co, a San Francisco-based design company. The iPhone has changed the game, and the cell phone has evolved to where features no longer differentiate. HTC, traditionally a very engineering-driven company. In fact, they have traditonally been a white-label design and manufacturing company for the OEMs - you wouldn't even see their logo on the phone. They sensed that they had a weakness, and didn't have the design culture to compete against Apple, so they bought a consumer-design company. This is one more datapoint showing that the technology industry is getting serious about design as a differentiator. I think it will help HTC leapfrog from supplier to a leading contender in the next couple of years.

One other tidbit in the article I found personally interesting - HTC is hoping that insights and ideas from other non-competing One and Co projects will make their way into HTC designs. For instance, One and Co's work with K2 may lead to new materials for HTC phones. I'm glad that they think that way, and I hope that thinking becomes pervasive in software. I always thought that this was a core strength of Macadamian - the lessons, insights, and ideas we gain in one vertical are applied to another, creating new opportunities, or simply better ways of doing things.

Macadamian named to the InfoWorld 100

A happy start to the week - we were awarded an Infoworld 100 award for innovative use of technology in our business.

To give a bit of context to new readers, at Macadamian we design and build products for other technology companies. We're a software consultancy whose mission in life is to help other technology companies create great software products. We want our customer's customers to be as passionate about our customer's software as they are about their iPod.

We've grown to over 150 staff, in 4 countries, and we're delivering over 100 projects a year - most of them on tight deadlines. Our methodology blends user-centered design and agile project management. Predictability is key - we need to deliver what we said we would deliver on the day we said we'd deliver it. Or else.

So to tie together a project team distributed around the world, with customers distributed around the world, our Process Improvement team, led by Sylvain St-Germain, developed ProjectTools. ProjectTools is both the glue between our configuration management (namely Subversion and Jira) and collaboration tools (Confluence and secure newsgroups), and a dashboard that collects data from all those systems and presents them visually. It manages tasks, tracks defects, and provides Wiki functionality so that team members and our customers can collaborate and share information 24/7. What's really killer though, is it gives both our teams and customers a simple, visual view of the health of a project. It provides complete transparency - everyone sees how the project is progressing versus the planned schedule, and the full status (defects, planned vs. unplanned work, and a host of other metrics), in real-time.

Sylvain and his team live the Macadamian values - Transparency, Responsiveness, Agility, Collaboration, and Constant Improvement. Customers love ProjectTools, so I'm thrilled that the industry has recognized his team's work. Congratulations guys!

Voice of the customer

If you're in Ottawa on Nov 13, check out this event on Voice of the Customer.

Figuring out what users really want is probably the biggest challenge product managers and designers face today. It's easy to fall into the trap of simply gathering user feedback and turning into product requirements. How do you create the game-changing breakthrough products that users can't even imagine? You've heard it said that if Henry Ford asked for user feedback, he'd have built a faster horse carriage.

We partnered with OCRI to set up a panel of three user experience experts to find out how they go beyond user feedback and discover the true needs of their customers, and translate that into products that will sell. If you're a product manager, software executive, or UX designer, you won't want to miss this event.

Business models to learn from

I was flattered when I read this post by Andrew Waitman about business models to watch. Andrew is a respected VC in the Ottawa tech community, and he cites Macadamian as one of the business models to learn from, particularly in a tight investment climate. Also nice to be mentioned along with some companies I really admire: Fidus, Pythian, MXI and Fuel Industries

Social media and user feedback

Here's something you would have never seen prior to social media - users banding together to critique your product, using your product.

This month Facebook redesigned their interface, with the aim of reducing the clutter, and a number of users joined in protest by forming Facebook Redesign Protest groups.

The redesign was well executed, but what really impressed me was the response to the protest by Facebook execs. They are very confident that users will love the new redesign, and they find it humerous that people are using their product to protest their product.

The immediate feedback loop of Web 2.0 can be your downfall if you're not careful. Some Web 2.0 companies only look at feedback, and things like split-testing (creating two pages with two different designs, and serving each to half of your users to see which gets a better response rate or better feedback). In chatting with one of our Sr. Usability Architects, Scott Plewes, last night, he related that any time you don't use direct observation as part of the user-feedback mix, you risk missing the context and misinterpreting the data. Bottom line - you need to understand the motivation behind a user's decisions or you are flying blind.

I don't have the inside line on the Facebook redesign, but I'm sure Facebook employed a number of testing methods to gather feedback on the design - things like focus groups, ethnographic research (observing users using Facebook in their natural habitat), and usability testing. Where a number of Web 2.0 companies would have hit the panic button and rolled back the changes when they saw the protest, Facebook execs were calm and confident that they did the right thing, no doubt because they did their homework.

How do you structure a team for innovation?

I had the privilege of attending the Forbes Leadership conference yesterday. If you ever have the chance to attend, it's a must.

The topic was innovation, and one panel was on innovation and teams. One panelist mentioned that he believed innovation was a team sport, an idea that I subscribe to.

We talked a bit about how to structure a team for innovation - what individual backgrounds, personalities, and roles make a great team that comes up with breakthrough innovations? Judy Estrin had a great answer - what's most important is not the specific backgrounds, but that the team has cognitive diversity. If you're trying to come up with a disruptive product, you need a team of people who each approach problems from different angles - who will challenge one another and help spark creative ideas by following brainstorming paths they might not have otherwise followed.