Bruce MacVarish Notes

The ROI of UX

Back in 2006, Jon Lax decided he was going to invest in companies that delivered an exceptional User Experience.  He called it the UX Fund.

"We struggle with the notion of ROI of UX. In our industry there is a lot of talk about getting the ROI of UX proven to the C-level executive. In my opinion, these attempts try to draw cause and effect relationships between activities and value. These micro-measurements are ineffective and are often non-existent. Instead, the ROI of UX comes at macro levels. Companies that internalize the values of doing great UX will see it permeate in their performance. This fund is an attempt to illustrate that.

Our difference was we were going to bias to companies who could offer great customer and user experiences and we were going to actually invest in them. We put actual money on the line.

The Criteria
Our investment strategy focused around 4 criteria:

1. A demonstrated care in the design of their products and Web site

2. A history of innovation

3. They inspire loyalty in their customer base

4. Doing business with them is a positive experience

Notice we looked at no financial criteria. We were not looking for value stocks nor did we look at EPS or any real quantitative or technical measures. We invested entirely on subjective criteria.

Performance
In the 365 days we owned our stocks the value of the portfolio increased 39.37%. This outperformed the major indexes (NASDAQ 18.09%, S+P 9.47%, NASDAQ 100 26.81%, NYSE 14.67%).

6 of our 10 stocks gained in value while 4 declined."

TellMe Founders leaving Microsoft

Om Malik writes about the exit of TellMe founders Mike McCue and Angus Davis are leaving Microsoft.  I agree with Om... the question is "what do they do next?"

Kara Swisher reported earlier today that Tellme founder Mike McCue is leaving Microsoft at the end of June 2009. His Tellme co-founder, Angus Davis, is leaving the company as well. He sent out an email to his friends and family, shortly after announcing the news to the Tellme team. I’ve covered the speech-recognition company from when it was started to the day it became part of Microsoft after the software giant bought it for a rumored $800 million. Microsoft has plans to use voice as a mobile phone interface. Mike and Angus went through some serious ups and downs with Tellme. It was a deal with AT&T that helped Tellme get its mojo. I don’t think their exit disrupts Tellme’s operations. My question is, what do they do next?

Webware 100 Winners - Communications

Webware's 100  Winners for the Communications Category

• Digsby
• Dimdim
• Gmail
• Pidgin
• Postbox
• RingCentral
• Skype
• Windows Live Hotmail
• Windows Live Messenger
• Yahoo Messenger

Bring Structure & Context to Unstructured Data

Andrew Weissman, founder and COO of Betaworks, highlights themes that he/Betaworks find valuable as they continue their push to create the network of Now Web companies.

"... a number of themes that we believe fundamentally change the media, the online media, the world.  Specifically, businesses that add context (or structure) to unstructured information or data and the social web (services that connect people and data). " 

As a proof-point, Betaworks invested in the latest round of UserVoice, a web based social idea and user feedback service.

10 Workplace Skills for the Future

I've used the "10 year forecast" reports created by the Institute for the Future a number of times and continue to find their perspective valuable.

They recently distilled some of their research down to 10 Workplace Skills for the Future.  These skills highlight the impact of changes in social collaboration, networked information, filtering the flow of relevant conversations and the migration of value to individual business users at the edge of the enterprise.

In 2007 the Institute for the Future laid out 10 workplace skills. Originally used as part of the Superhero Skills from the 2007 Ten-Year Forecast annual retreat, they were then adapted as part of the Future of Workresearch, and finally repurposed as badges for the Superstruct game in 2008.

Most recently, Bob Johansen, Distinguished Fellow at IFTF, has published his newest book, Leaders Make the Future, in which he delves much further into these workplace skills to create 10 new leadership skills.
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Ping Quotient 
Excellent responsiveness to other people's requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network

Longbroading 
Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles

Open Authorship 
Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors

Cooperation Radar 
The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission

Multi-Capitalism 
Fluency in working and trading simultaneously with different hybrid capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtual

Mobbability 
The ability to do real-time work in very large groups; a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously; extreme-scale collaboration

Protovation 
Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles; the ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure

Influency 
Knowing how to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (each space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique)

Signal/Noise Management 
Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice

Emergensight 
The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation and collaboration on extreme scales

Social Filters shifting new value and revenue to the Enterprise Edge

We continue to see the migration of new user value, and therefore new revenue opportunities, to the edge of the enterprise where employees connect directly with users. 

As the enterprise becomes more social, the companies who make it easy for end-users and employees to jointly discover, capture, create, share and analyze their most important transactions, conversations and relationships will win.  Enterprise Incumbents and New Players are all actively pursuing this emerging opportunity (see Enterprise Edge Matrix-2009). 

Joshua-Michele at Opposable Planets agrees:

"The operating premise for all social filtering is simple; we trust the opinions of people more than companies. We build relationships with individuals (people) more easily than with companies. It is easier to be loyal to a person than a company. So when it comes to needing information people will more readily turn to people. This Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious (BGO) reinforces why companies need to continue to move towards a social model of business and a culture that empowers more employees to build relationships with the outside world. In a networked world communication choke points are lost opportunities."

VRM ListenLog

Keith Hopper outlines his vision for ListenLog as an example (and element?) of future VRM solutions:

A user-driven activity log works well for an application that pulls together audio streams and files from a number of different sources. Of course, online audio providers (vendors in the VRM model) can already track and aggregate listening behavior data, but only for the audio they control. When the user acts as the sole point of integration, pulling together audio from multiple sources, their own consolidated log becomes unique and powerful. Only when the listener is the point of integration does such an approach yield unique value.

The Stream oriented User Experience

Nova Spivack's take on the emergence of flow-ready applications and activity streams:

"The emergence of the Stream is an interesting paradigm shift that may turn out to characterize the next evolution of the Web, this coming third-decade of the Web's development. Even though the underlying data model may be increasingly like a graph, or even a semantic graph, the user experience will be increasingly stream oriented.

Whether Twitter, or some other app, the Web is becoming increasingly streamlike. How will we filter this stream? How will we cope? Whoever can solve these problems first and best is probably going to get rich."

Work Smarter

From Signal ... to Data ... to Enlightenment

James Kelway recounts listening to Google's Bradley Horowitz describe how he / they think about data and metadata:

(Horowitz) told of everyday devices that have achieved ubiquity - that can now record your entire life digitally. Ubiquity is here.  The mobile phone is everywhere.

The problem as he saw it was that you can record everything but you don’t get another life to review it all. The challenge is harvesting metadata and defining context to give meaning to what we do.

So how do you use the information to a useful end? Horowitz (and Google) knows that the big problem is that we are dying from the start. Moments evaporate from the start.

A very pertinent point was that technology needs to adapt and enhance the human life. He asked how do we solve attention management? The moments of life that need revisiting amongst the morass of spam and junk we all wade through.

A key observation was that metadata is as important as the data itself.

Then he briefly showed a mental model that reflected the Google approach to data, starting at signal and working upwards.

• enlightenment
• wisdom
• knowledge
• information
• data
• signal 

I like this model and have been thinking about this from the enterprise perspective. 

If I think about enterprise transactions, conversations or relationships as social objects with the ability to send real-time signals, what is needed to take the signal and associated data to add value for users?  

How do we help users leverage signal, data and information to create knowledge, wisdom and insight?