Yaron Galai, writing for the AdAge.com:

[…] Google is going to flip SEO on its head. If Old SEO enabled some to fool a crawler into indexing borderline junk content to get high rankings, New SEO looks likely to take any notion of fooling anyone out of the equation. […]

With New SEO, the pendulum is finally swinging back to favoring humans over crawlers. The New SEO rules point directly back to what was valued in the traditional print-dominated days – content will not be a mechanism to convert clicks but a tool to boost awareness, increase overall engagement and offer opportunities to connect with a quality audience. And the “customer” that content is tailored for will no longer be SEO bots […], as the New SEO favors the true end-user: the reader.

This sounds like SEO catching up with what UX has been arguing all along.

The odd part is that this has to be rebranded as New SEO. From a user’s point of view, it is just design with the reader put back in the room.

Horace Dediu has an interesting comment on the decline of the PC industry and the growth of the tablet market.

He questions the usual analyst explanations. If the buying conditions are the same for both PCs and tablets, blaming the economy, the rate of innovation or some other external pressure only explains half the story. It explains why people might delay a PC purchase. It does not explain why they keep buying tablets.

Dediu writes:

My hypothesis is that the new products are solving new jobs for the users and those new solutions are trumping any “softness” in demand. In other words, an upgrade to an over-serving product will be deferred at the slightest excuse while an installation of an under-serving product that attacks an unsolved problem will be rationalized no matter the circumstances.

One product will be met with “Why should we buy it?” and the other by “Why shouldn’t we buy it?”

That distinction is useful. A PC upgrade asks people to justify replacing something that already works well enough. A tablet gives them a way to solve a problem that was still awkward, unfinished or poorly served.

Clayton Christensen, on disruptive innovation (from Wikipedia):

1. Established companies are usually aware of the innovations, but their business environment does not allow them to pursue them when they first arise, because they are not profitable enough. […] Firm’s existing value networks place insufficient value on the disruptive innovation.

2. Meanwhile, start-up firms inhabit different value networks, at least until the day that their disruptive innovation is able to invade the older value network.

3. At that time, the established firm in that network can at best only fend off the market share attack with a me-too entry, for which survival is the only reward.

The important part is that incumbents are usually not blind. They can often see the new product, the new behaviour and the new market forming. The problem is that their existing business gives them perfectly rational reasons to ignore it.

That is what makes disruption so uncomfortable. From inside the company, the wrong decision can look disciplined, financially responsible and strategically mature. Then the new value network grows up, crosses over, and the best available response is a defensive copy.

It is hard to read that without thinking of RIM, Dell or HP. By the time the threat is obvious enough to fit the old model, survival may already be the reward.

Ryan Woodward, on animation:

The Illusion of Life. This is where it’s at. […]

If the movement doesn’t help the viewer to believe that this character or object has life, then by definition, it’s not animation. That is the distinction between motion graphics and animation. Animation is hard to accomplish.

Motion can be decorative, technical or impressive in its own right. Animation has to do something more difficult: it has to make the viewer believe there is life behind the movement.

Bonus: Ryan Woodward’s brilliant short 2D animation, Thought of You.

Via Steven Scott (@stv_scott).

Ken Cato, on creativity and understanding:

When I tackle projects, the battle is not the creative thing; the battle is to keep the mind open until you fully understand the exercise. A lot of designers hear the brief and make very quick assumptions. I think the longer you can hold that open, the more chance outside influences and experiences will come into play.

The useful point here is that creativity is often framed as the hard part of design. Cato puts the difficulty earlier. The real discipline is resisting the urge to close the brief too quickly.

A fast assumption feels productive because it gives the project shape. It also narrows the field before the designer has properly understood what is in front of them. The longer the question stays open, the more room there is for useful outside influences to enter the work.

Understanding is part of the creative process. Usually, it is the part that decides whether the creative work has anywhere worth going.

Via iconic logo designers.

Dwayne Spradlin, writing for Harvard Business Review:

“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” Albert Einstein said.

Those were wise words, but from what I have observed, most organizations don’t heed them when tackling innovation projects. Indeed, when developing new products, processes, or even businesses, most companies aren’t sufficiently rigorous in defining the problems they’re attempting to solve and articulating why those issues are important. Without that rigor, organizations miss opportunities, waste resources, and end up pursuing innovation initiatives that aren’t aligned with their strategies. How many times have you seen a project go down one path only to realize in hindsight that it should have gone down another? How many times have you seen an innovation program deliver a seemingly breakthrough result only to find that it can’t be implemented or it addresses the wrong problem? Many organizations need to become better at asking the right questions so that they tackle the right problems.

Different fields have their own way of framing this problem. Medicine, strategy, data, design, advertising and innovation all circle the same point: the hardest part is often not finding a solution. It is understanding the problem well enough to know what a solution would even mean.

There is broad agreement that deeper understanding leads to better, stronger, more elegant solutions that are easier to implement. There is also broad evidence, usually found in meeting rooms, that people prefer to start solving before they have properly defined what needs solving.

The solution feels like progress. The question is where the progress begins.

¹ Julian Williams has some interesting, but fairly misguided, thoughts in his opinion piece, Nokia’s marketing masterstroke:

Nokia launched the Nokia Lumia 920 recently. Before it was available to buy.

Their share price went down. They couldn’t even give firm delivery dates and carrier details.

But they knew what they were doing.

Really?

I agree that Nokia knew what it was doing, provided we also accept that this may have been the only thing it could do given the mess it was in. That does not make it a marketing masterstroke. It makes it a desperate move from a company reaching for tactics it would probably rather avoid. I would be careful before describing that as ‘out-Appleing Apple’.

Nokia put itself in a position where, for the next few months, ‘wait’ was the only thing it could sell. Once the iPhone 5 was out, Nokia could not make a full case for how good or different the new Lumias were, because the Lumia 920 did not yet exist as a product people could buy. It had nothing solid to fight with.

Worse, by pre-announcing the Lumia 920, Nokia hit the brakes on its current handset sales. It sacrificed revenue during the gap between launch and release. That is not a free ride.

Then came the iPhone 5 launch a day ago. And every technical specification was compared to the latest phone launches. Because Nokia launched first, it became the phone of choice for comparison.

And what happened? All the journalists from around the world pulled on the Nokia 920 as a benchmark.

It won on every technical point.

And Nokia are now getting marketed via Apple. For free.

Because the journalists couldn’t get away from the fact the Nokia Lumia 920 is a better, more powerful, more innovative phone.

I agree that journalists focused on the stand-out features. What else could they do when they had not used the finished product? Nokia probably got some attention from that. The question is whether attention from specification comparisons is the kind of win Nokia needed.

A real-world test for any feature is simple enough: people must use it, and people must value it. If a feature exists mainly because it photographs well, compares well, or gives reviewers something to point at, it is marketing material before it is product design.

This is why Nokia’s bet on NFC is interesting. The company seemed to believe that NFC would quickly become a mass-market behaviour. Perhaps. But was it a problem people urgently needed solved at that moment?

Wireless charging raises the same issue. When I first saw the video, I was intrigued. Then I thought about how and where I actually use charger cables and docks, and the case became much weaker. It is a neat feature, but in everyday use I suspect many Nokia charging pads will gather dust after the first few weeks. Nice idea. Possibly furniture.

Then there is performance. I do not know where the Lumia 920 will sit on the performance charts, and neither does David Trott Julian Williams. Judging by its predecessor, the Lumia 900, which was released only about six months earlier, the outlook was not especially promising.

I still struggle to see why Nokia deserves praise here. Burning energy on features that play well in the media, but may not be used or valued by customers, is risky when the clock is ticking. Nokia is a brilliant and iconic brand, which makes its decline more painful to watch. The frustrating part is that so much of it appears to be self-inflicted. Imagine what it could do if it stopped wasting time on stupid things.

So, through a masterstroke of predatory thinking, Nokia has won the first round in this heavyweight smartphone brawl.

Not only in the eyes of the journalists. But in those of iPhone users too.

And that’s a bullseye!

I will leave aside what makes an iPhone user look elsewhere. It seems to me that the first round, in every meaningful sense, went to Apple. Marketing only counts when it produces real results.

I still do not really know what ‘Predatory Thinking’ is. I do know what ‘out-Appleing Apple’ is not. Nokia has a long way to go before it makes a dent.

I like to think making things involves more than simply mixing ingredients.

Otherwise, journalism is just words on a page, art is paint and brushes, management is just making decisions, and design is only shapes and materials.

The ingredients are rarely the point. The work is in the judgement: what you choose, what you leave out, how the parts fit together, and whether the result has any value once it leaves your hands.

Seth Godin, in Advertising’s bumpy transition, has a few interesting thoughts on what sets the priorities of today’s web media. The bottom line is this:

Since advertising is paying for a big portion of the consumer web, it’s being built to please advertisers. Right now, though, what advertisers are used to buying isn’t what the web is good at building.

This is the trap. A product built solely around users will usually become more popular, more engaging and more attractive to advertisers. To please advertisers, focus on users.

Shape the product around advertisers first and you will eventually lose the users. Once that happens, the advertisers will leave too. They are not buying the page. They are buying the attention on it.

Most online media businesses describe their customers as two groups:

A. Users
B. Advertisers

Both matter. But only one group should shape the product, because the relationship between them is not symmetrical.

A simple test makes this clear. Imagine either group dropped by 90% for a month.

If users go elsewhere, advertisers will leave soon after, and they will have little reason to come back. If advertisers disappear, users may barely notice. In many cases, they may prefer it: fewer distractions, faster pages and less machinery between them and the thing they came to read.

This does not make advertisers irrelevant. It makes them dependent. Advertisers follow attention, and attention belongs to users.

So the product should be shaped around the audience. Please users first, and advertisers still have something to buy.