Problem solving

Posted on June 28th, 2007 in Opinions by Puneet Sarda
I think this is the single most important skill that any of us needs to develop over time. Everything is around solving problems in some or the other way, whether its cleaning clothes(washing machines, detergents) or commuting(cars, planes) or managing a business(accounts, crm software) etc…
I want to talk about a few important factors that come into play when solving problems and how we should make the most of them.
  • Understanding: No significant problem, when it first appeared to mankind, was so simple that it could be understood immediately. When man first saw fire, he was absolutely amazed that how could that happen. It was a complex problem then. The important point here is that most of the times we solve or try to solve a problem without a complete understanding of the same. We need to accept that in all sincerity and realize that as we probe further we will gain more knowledge. Additionally this probing is also a part of the problem solving process and lack of understanding should not deter us from probing further, on the contrary it should be the stimuli for probing.
  • Instincts: We all have a gut feeling about things, some of these being strong feelings while others not being so strong. It is important to realize that instincts help put together some parts of the puzzle which lack of understanding and knowledge left hanging around. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book Blink, our first hunch about certain things and the innate ability to thin slice an issue at hand can come in very handy. It’s important to pay attention to our instincts and more important to know when to put them into use.
  • Experience: Repetitively doing the above will help us accumulate experience. Over time, it will also help us put together some pieces of the puzzles which understanding or instincts cannot really help us with. Its a two way road where our experience increases as we solve more problems and our instincts and ability to understand increase with more experience, hence increasing our problem solving skills. It’s smart to learn from the experience of others who have solved same/similar problems as that narrows down the range of error and helps as a guide to begin with.
  • Resources: Today’s world does not suffer as much from lack of resources as much it does from over abundance of them. The onus is on us to carefully select the criteria to select the resources and then select the appropriate resources. Everything from research papers and lab equipment to team members and software are resources. What needs to be used when and how is the crucial issue.
  • Measurement: There has to be a way to know how are we doing so far as we try to solve the problem. We need to measure ourselves against some standards, tried and tested metrics which have worked in the past etc… Selecting the right metrics and revising the list (only if necessary) is something we should pay sufficient attention to.
  • Planning: Scheduling events is something we learn from nature. Day followed by night followed by day. Scheduling events, managing resources and measuring progress or failure are absolutely important to solve a problem. It helps you know the direction you are headed in and decide when/how any diversions are necessary. It is also important to realize that the goal is to solve the problem and not create/maintain the perfect plan.
  • IDEAS: Above all, I consider this the most important factor that can aide us in solving problems. We have to realize that creativity rules. New and interesting solutions are always welcome, ofcourse if they work. Aeron chairs redefined office chairs and Google redefined search. Ideas lead to innovations. To be creative or to have creative people on the team is extremely important. There are many problems out there which have been solved but not all solutions out there are the ones that necessarily interest the consumers. There are few new problems to solve but many existing ones could definitely benefit from an innovative idea. I personally value creativity and ideas more than anything when it comes to problem solving.

Problems make our life, problem solving is pretty much all we do all our lives. There are no golden rules to solve problems but the few factors I mentioned above go a long way in developing the skill.

Feel free to leave comments on what you consider important or what has worked out well for you.

Update: Leo from Zenhabits added a link to this post on his Tumblr Blog. Thanks Leo.

Relearn to Drive

Posted on June 21st, 2007 in Cars by Puneet Sarda

BMW has come up with an excellent plan to promote their cars as well as give their existing and potential consumers a great way to enjoy cars. We have all seen car racing and the closest we have come to experiencing it ourselves are simulation games, often played with advanced gaming devices to give the players a real feel of the game.

BMW Performance Driving School 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But what if you could go on a race track and drive around cones, challenging terrain and spin cars. That’s what BMW is offering with their new BMW Performance Driving School. You get to choose which BMW you want to drive, what kind of class you want to attend and with instructors assigned to you, you are on your way to enjoy some cool driving. Check out the videos at the performance center to see some first class driving.

However, thats not all. The best part about this is the way they have promoted it. Check out the RelearnToDrive site and see the cool videos which may bring back some memories of how driving entered your life. It’s a wonderful marketing technique and I believe will soon become viral.

Who taught you driving

Is Design just eye candy?

Posted on June 19th, 2007 in Design, Opinions by Puneet Sarda

Jess McMullin has an interesting post on his blog bplusd where he asks “Why is it that design focuses on surface elements?”. Read his post for all the details but in summary he puts forward 2 hypothesis as possible reasons for this :

First hypothesis: the design of surface elements acts as a prototypical category for design as a whole.

Second hypothesis: the volume of professional work across levels of design maturity means that there is relatively little framing and problem solving compared to style, form, and function.

For the first one he argues that as surface elements are easier to observe and experience, its likely to associate design with it. I thought of elaborating a little on this hypothesis. We see a lot of print/video ads and most of them are about glossy pictures and hot models showing off some product. There would be terms like “sleek design” thrown in and hopefully we will find some list of “features” etc. But that is the gist of how most products are introduced to customers. Few companies give sufficient weight to ,among other things, usability and simplicity in the initial ads. The immediate motive is to capture user attention with cool videos and pictures to make them look at the product and hopefully think about it.

Even when we browse websites , especially e-commerce websites, its the big product picture on the page that catches your attention and features are somewhere below or worse a link away. I think, we as designers, should pay attention as to how the customer gets educated about design? How do they build the perception of design as Jess describes it? Why is it that when they want to work on their products, revise them, modify them…they think more about “eye candy” and less about the other aspects of a mature design. Of course not all of us can be designers but its really important as a company to decide what kind of a perception of design are we building for our customers. Much has been said about the Ipod but the point I want to highlight is it was after Ipod that people started talking about “simple clean design”. Apple brought that vocabulary to a huge audience and over a period of time people were striving to have that ideology in their product design as well as tout it in their ads.

This kind of leads to the second hypothesis that yes there are lots of work for styling etc… as thats what the customer’s perception has been. Even if we as designers try to convince them otherwise and propose better ways to solve the same problem, without a good understanding of “What is good design” companies won’t be motivated to go beyond the styling.

I think as designers we need to educate our customers while we work with them as they come to us for the simple reason that they believe we know more about design than them. It’s this gentle touch of coaching your client that can make a great difference and help them better understand the idea of good design. Of course we should ourselves be sufficiently “design mature” in the first place but I think its such designers that companies would stick to once they see the benefits over time of well designed products instead of prettied up tools.

What do you think about these issues? Feel free to leave your comments

Clientcopia

Posted on June 18th, 2007 in Links by Puneet Sarda

Found this wonderful and entertaining website via Seth’s blog. Read the top 20 here. I am truly addicted to reading them.

Here’s on from the top 20:

Client: Can you design the site so that people that don’t have internet access can view it?

me: Sure; it’s called a brochure

=))

Just in time for me - Safari for Windows

Posted on June 12th, 2007 in Uncategorized by Puneet Sarda

I use Google Reader for all my RSS feeds but was getting a little bored of the seeing same interface everyday. I looked around on the net to see if someone had made a custom stylesheet for that and I was not disappointed. Hicksdesign has a cool theme and I grabbed it immediately. I have fallen in love with it and find it much cleaner compared to what Google has.

Well that led me to another search. I user IE7 at home and Firefox at work. (I guess most people do the other way around ) IE7 does not support applying a custom style for a particular website. You can go to the Accessibility options to fix a single stylesheet for all the websites you visit but they cannot be customized for each site. So I was thinking maybe I should install Firefox at home for just this one feature…see how far as a user I am willing to go to use the product I immediately fell in love with. It’s just that the memory hogging of Firefox pisses me off.

Apple to my rescue!!!…they just release Beta 3 of Safari for Windows. So I will try that out tonight and lets see how things go. Joel complained about it being terribly slow but later on posted an update that maybe it was just the first few times when he launched Safari. Jeff complains about the font rendering in Safari… lets hope they find a way to fix it at least for Windows.

Update: A Mac user says “Safari sucks”…should I still give it a try???

A new desktop metaphor

Posted on June 6th, 2007 in Next Gen Tech by Puneet Sarda

Or maybe an old one. Bumptop’a Ananda Agarwala was not happy with the way computers emulate the desktop metaphor and he thought it was time to go back to the basics. An by that I mean revisit the office desktop, see how things are there and then apply some physics to it…ya you read it right I said Physics. He gave a wonderful presentation at TED 2007 and he also has a video on Youtube explaining his ideas.


Microsoft Photosynth

Posted on June 5th, 2007 in Microsoft, Next Gen Tech by Puneet Sarda
Photosynth is a Microsoft Research project thats now made it to the real world and is on Live Labs. The idea is to look at digital photos in a whole new way and when I say whole new way, I really mean it. The idea is to be able to connect various photos of a particular location to be able to build a complete model of the place which you can now navigate around via zooming, flying and plain old clicking…all in the digital world. It connects pictures taken from various devices…cell phone cameras, digital camera, slr cameras etc… and forms a complete view of the obj in context which can be explored in all possible ways. This, I guess, gives a whole new meaning to “connecting the dots”. Watch the video below to see it in action.

Download Link: Photosynth

Blaise Aguera y Arcas , the lead behind Photosynth, gave an excellent demo at TED and you can see how the audience cannot stop saying WOW!! :)

Microsoft 10 points to BBC which has released 6 new collections to be viewed using photosynth.

I installed it and here is one of the screenshots as I played with it. (Click to enlarge)

Photosynth

iPhone: Coming June 29

Posted on June 4th, 2007 in Next Gen Tech by Puneet Sarda

Apple just released 3 ads of the iPhone… looks like its coming on June 29…too bad I am not getting one :(

Steve and Bill on stage together

Posted on June 1st, 2007 in Interviews by Puneet Sarda

Last time both of them appeared together on stage was during the Macintosh Dating Game. A lot has changed since then. In D5, both of them come back on stage together to discuss everything about Apple and Microsoft.

Watch the videos and listen to the two guys who pretty much shaped the complete software industry. I wanted to post the videos here but AllthingsD removed it from Brightcove and have only a partial list at Youtube.