Half of the office is messing around with Facetune.
January 27, 2019 Newsletter
The One-Minute Presentation Test
In my presentation workshop we talk about how to put together the right story, in the right order, for the people in the room. Then all the participants come up to the front and do a five-minute presentation. Recently, I’ve started assigning one of the participants to get up at the one-minute mark and walk out the door. After the presentation is over, they come back in and tell us what they heard. It’s usually nothing of value. How can we change this?
Sign up for my presentation workshop Friday, Feb 8, in San Francisco.
— Mike Monteiro (@monteiro)
Filtering Out
As of this writing, half the office is messing around with Facetune. It’s my fault for mentioning that I’d been reading about the purported trend of people taking their filtered selfies to the plastic surgeon and saying “Make me look like that.”
While software is eating the world, seeing the world through social media is reassembling the atoms still left out there. Our physical environment is becoming one big Sears portrait studio (minus the Sears), with problematic boundaries between authenticity and digital artifice. Adobe has been running Orwellian ads to promote erasing your ex — but apparently retaining their shadow. I miss Umberto Eco. He would have written a good essay on influencers.
— Erika Hall (@mulegirl)
In Defense of the $50 Mango
Last week, John C. Bogle, author of “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” died at 89. Bogle started the Vanguard investing group and popularized value-based investing. At Mule, we use value pricing to estimate projects. If you haven’t already, you should go out and borrow a copy of “Implementing Value Pricing” by Ron Baker immediately. While I’d never been exposed to value pricing before Mule, my mom has been a long time follower of Bogle and also Warren Buffett (a fellow Nebraskan) who’s famous for many things including his prize quote: “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.” Pricing is usually a pretty scary topic for designers (for good reason) because pricing your work is anxiety-inducing. While we spend lots of time thinking about our users, we often ignore how price impacts their decision-making. If instead we can treat price as an interface and an opportunity to understand our customers better, then pricing suddenly becomes an opportunity and not a barrier to entry. This week I spent time researching the history of the $50 mango, value-pricing at its best.
— Larisa Berger (@berglar)
Design Strategy for the Birds
We catch up with John Mahoney, Vice President of Digital Products at the National Audubon Society. Four years after a successful launch, we reflect on what it took to create a flexible new design system and achieve lasting change for a complex organization. A big part was “soaking in the pain.”
— Voice of Design (@VOD_Rocks)
