ResearchReeeeSEARCH–I went and saw Tom Stat from IDEO Chicago speak at last night’s Chi-squared meeting. The topic was pretty much just learning about their company. It wasn’t totally fresh for me since it was a Business Week article featuring IDEO’s great design and great design-process that made me leave my job at Xerox. I went to my boss saying “When are we going to design products like this, and use this process?” When he said “We’re on our way, but we’re not there yet.” I bailed and went to a dotcom.

Of course now I’m at TMPW. People who know me well understand that I get fired up when I listen to the voice of reason. Reading outside perspectives on our company, or learning about how another company works always makes me reflect in a more meaningful way on how our company works. It’s a lot different than being spoonfed the company line saying that we’re innovative. How about we ACT innovative, and convince the public that we ARE innovative by marketing that fact. I respect that people have opinions about TMPW (look at the blog from 8/22/2002), and more often than not they’re right at some level or another. I have opinions too. But I’m a person that acts.

Currently, we can’t admit that we as TMP are a product development company. While we make products, we claim that we are a sales and marketing company. Well guess what? The way you ACT innovative is to make innovative things (products) that people find useful. Sales and marketing aren’t innovation. They are the RESULT of innovation. The IDEO way is to keep the user at the center of everything. And not what they say…what they DO. Every time IDEO does a project they study the potential users in their environment – Contextual Inquiry. They take pictures, they observe user shortcuts like post-it notes, or crib sheets. They observe their processes. They don’t rely on the words of the client, or their own account people to define innovation. The design teams DO RESEARCH. IT IS NOT OPTIONAL. And the user is the only thing Senior Management cares about. Design is king. Design is innovation. Good design sells and markets itself. Arrrrrghhhh. I’m way too fired up. I will not bail. I will find a way to innovate.

The Bills flag has returned, but the heister is still unknown. Mysteriously it showed up on my neighbor’s flag pole across the street on Saturday morning. I went out to confront him, and he said he didn’t do it. Someone else in our ‘hood framed him. I think I know who. Better watch out. Revenge is sweet – but unfortunately, not sanctioned by the Catholic church (see below).

Tricia and I are starting a new undertaking over the next couple of years. Every other Sunday during the school year, we’re going to have High School kids over to our place to learn about getting closer to Jesus, getting closer to Confirmation, and getting closer to eating us out of house and home. We start off this adventure (called “Quest”) with Freshmen. The class of 2006 will never be the same without the coolest Quest leaders in their lives.

Step 1 of becoming someone who can actually teach kids about church stuff is actually learning a thing or two about our religion. I’ve got all of the enthusiasm but none of the book smarts to really help these kids learn something. Thus, my latest reading listed in my ultra-cool new sidebar.

Is it possible that my blog can live up the the hype of this graphic? Mark, interactionartdirecdesignboy in the TMP NY office designed this beauty. I don’t think I’ll have a problem meeting the challenge. As a matter of fact, I’m inspired.

Just 2 games into the Buffalo Bills young 2002 campaign and already I’m in love with Drew Bledsoe as the next coming of Jim Kelly. As a result of their 45-39 overtime victory over the Vikings, I’m officially going to be the 1,000,000th Bills fan to declare that “We’re going to the Bowl!”. Ridiculous? Yes. Uncommon? No. And far more benign than one of the idiot Bears fans in my neighborhood that took down my beautiful Bills Flag and put up a tattered pillowcase with “BEARS 2-0!” on it. Amateurs.

IHaveAComplex–As I wrote in my one and only Manifesto my parents didn’t help me in the naming department. So when a coworker sent me this image – thinking I would get a kick out of seeing “Zippy” on the cover of a book, I was shocked. Dumbfounded. My mind was spinning. Can it be that my nickname ALSO suffers the same gender bending fate? Ugh. I suppose I now have to buy the damn book…

The other day I overheard someone say that Home Depot is a “Man Mall”. That women go there all the time to find hot men. Ya know like shopping at a mall where all that’s on sale is men…tee hee. And men go there and shop til they drop like they’re a chick at the mall…tee hee. And I admit that I have been spending an amazing amount of hours at Home Depot while I’ve been finishing my basement. I have to ask though, what motivated a guy to sit in a Home Depot for a 2 day dare in which the penalty was a faceload of peanut butter and fluffernutter? Find out more by reading his journal about it.

OK, instead of reading the dissertation I just wrote on web accessiblity, rife with amazing insight, and groundbreaking ideas, you are reading a simple expletive. F THIS! websites that timeout suck! Blogger, you suck for timing out when I hit the post button. You suck for being as sucky as an IBM 386, that gives you the blue screen when you go to save your term paper. C’mon web people. The days of timing out and deleting data are over. You can’t expect people to contribute quality thought to the web if your input method SUCKS! If I had more time on my hands I’d develop the equivalent to “F’d Company” that would be “F’d Words”. It would be a warehouse of all of the Ebay ads that I have lost, the blogs that I have lost, the blood sweat and tears that I have lost. FYou Blogger! The days of copying and pasting my text out of my web text input fields are over.

Colophon: The text in this message was carefully crafted in the Blogger Text Input area, copied to my Windows 2000 clipboard and pasted into my blog window after receiving a timeout error.

Last year we bought our 2001 Dodge Durango from the local Dodge dealer. We were greeted by a weird little guy who barely spoke English, who was kind of your typical car salesman. We ended up doing the deal with the owner and just using this salesman as the not-so-helpful let me screw-you-on-this-deal guy. Turns out this salesman killed a buyer at the dealership the other day by mistakenly backing his new truck into him. The poor father who was killed was probably saving his 2 year old son. This really freaked me out. What a terrible course of events for everyone involved. I’m going to resume trying not to think about it now…

I had the pleasure of having free lunch at Maggiano’s yesterday. Ivan and I had great appetizers of stuffed Mushrooms and Spinach-Artichoke Dip. We then had a big helping of Eric Schaffer patting his own back on how to institutionalize usability using his Usability Central product. OK the guy is good. But he’s used to hearing that from many people. The idea is cool. I could buy all the usability documentation from him and put it on my intranet so I don’t have to build all that stuff from scratch. It will be cool when I come up with the $14,000 for it.

Christina Wodtke posted an excellent article on boxes and arrows talking about Information Architects not being considered designers. Amazing that people would find what I do not to be design. Furthermore interesting to note that Christina understands so perfectly the difference between one who defends his work (designer) and one who does not (the majority of other people on any given project). I ranted about it. Now I’m over it. Returning to my exquisitely undefined job now…