Could a false sense of urgency be plaguing your company? It can be tricky to diagnose and correct, because on the surface, it can appear as simple urgency. But, in the scenario of a false sense of urgency, there's a frantic feeling, driven by anxiety, anger, frustration and a lack of focus. It’s typically reactive (and not proactive) in direction.
A false sense of urgency tends to flourish in environments where there are continuous, unproductive meetings. You’ve probably been in one or two of those meetings — the ones with extravagantly detailed PowerPoint presentations that ultimately contain no conclusions or purpose.
John P. Kotter, former Harvard professor and author of A Sense Of Urgency, points out that a true sense of urgency isn’t an attitude that you must simply have a team meeting today, but rather that the meeting must accomplish something important.
Is the false sense of urgency hindering you or your company’s ability to be successful? If so, what’s your willingness to address the issue now?
When it comes to creating great ads, I believe that e-mail has set us back about 50 years... to the old days, when a copywriter would write a headline; then, he’d walk that headline down the hall to the art director and slip it under the door. The art director would come up with a visual for it and that’s how ads got done. Not face-to-face... but door to door.
Now we’re separated by computers instead of doors. So it's worthwhile to remember the advantages of creating face-to-face:
For your next creative challenge, shut down your e-mail, walk down the hall, go face-to-face and make the sparks fly.
Pepsi recently revamped its logo by arcing the white band in the Pepsi circle so that it forms a series of “smiles.” The estimated cost for the redesign according to Advertising Age – over $1 million. The cost of changing signage on vending machines, point-of-sale materials and more around the world – several hundred million dollars. Is this new design worthy of such spending? Reactions are mixed. But if the company wanted to make a “quantum leap” forward in transforming the soft-drink category as Pepsi executives claim, the jury is still out. In fact, some detractors liken the new design to “a series of growing beer guts,” “a Pac-Man make over,” and “the backside of Joe the Plumber.” We believe getting feedback to our work is critical. Hopefully Pepsi got lots of feedback on its new logo and is not surprised by the reaction it’s engendering.
Could those colored sticky notes you have at your desk possibly be one of the most powerful tools at your disposal?Social scientist Randy Garner recently sent out a survey and, in some form, a request to complete them. Some of the surveys went with only a cover letter, some with a handwritten note on the cover letter and some with a handwritten sticky note on the cover letter. The results were surprising. The cover letter sample had a 36% response rate and the handwritten note on the cover letter sample had a 48% response rate while the handwritten sticky note got a whopping 75% response rate. And when a thank you and the sender’s initials were added, the return rate even jumped further.The universal law of reciprocity was activated by the perception of the extra time the sender took and the receiver felt more obligated to not only return the survey, but also return it faster than the other methods. So get those sticky notes out of the drawer and reexamine their possibilities.Source: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini
Interfaces excel at one thing: enabling users to perform tasks without needing to understand the behind-the-scenes complexities. Flip a light switch, and you have light – without any electrical engineering expertise. The promise of simplicity and utility…that’s a good interface.
Interface disasters occur when that promise is broken. For example:
People have high expectations when using software or visiting a website. The Web 2.0 revolution has brought many innovations, like simplified graphics, contextual inline controls, direct-data manipulation (e.g. paging through photos on an iPhone) and global undo, all of which continue to be refined via web analytics and represent the future of human-machine interaction. So when designing an interface, use some common sense with icons and controls and basically stay out of the way of the user and their goals.