Meaningful: The Story of Ideas that Fly
I decided to start 2016 on the right foot by reading a book my boss recommended over the holiday. Once I started, I couldn’t put it down. The book is Meaningful: The Story of Ideas that Fly, by Bernadette Jiwa.
What I most appreciate about this book is that it takes the questions of User Experience as a practice, and opens them to other disciplines in business. This is essentially UX thinking written in a tone that non-designers can grasp. While this isn’t my first exposure to Jiwa’s work, I always appreciate the way she makes ideas simple, accessible and open to a variety of audiences through tone and anecdotes.
My favorite part of this book is the really sharply written quotable format of the language. Jiwa also introduces a tool for story fit, which I’ll be testing out at work and will provide a separate review in the future.
The two most important things we can do are to allow ourselves to be seen AND to really see others. The greatest gift you can give a person is to see who she is and to reflect that back to her. When we help people to be who they want to be, to take back some of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.
-Bernadette Jiwa, Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly
That’s all anyone wants, after all, to be understood, and valued. To know that their life is being considered, their choices cherished, their values adhered to. Forbes recently wrote an article about digital transformation, pulling together some statistics from the big data shops like Gartner and Forrester. One of the most important quotes was:
By 2017, 60% of enterprises with a digital transformation strategy will deem it too critical for any one functional area and create an independent corporate executive to oversee the implementation.
Source: Forbes Magazine, December 6th, 2015
However, what I hope companies begin to grasp as they proceed in developing digital strategies is that digital empowers us to listen to customers, cut the noise and really receive signals about where we should move and what we should invest in.
Jared Spool did some great research on this and discovered that teams who have two hours of direct exposure to customers every six weeks as a minimum see great improvements to their user experience.
I heard him describe the results on the UIE podcast recently at the 2015 User Experience Advantage conference. In it he describes looking at companies who are in non-software spaces, and determining how they fare against competitors, and seeing whether user interaction had any difference in the way that the businesses profit. What he finds is surprising to some, but it’s really powerful. Companies that listen to their users/customers outperform competitors in almost every area with few exceptions.
One of my goals for 2016 is to turn exposure hours into a KPI by which we can judge the success of projects at work. I’m going to advocate for it, because listening is what makes things Meaningful.
Ideas that fly are powered by empathy, by helping users tell their stories, instead of telling ours to them. I strongly encourage everyone whether in UX, marketing, business or entrepreneurship to pick up this book and let it inspire new processes and new methods of listening.
Cheers,
To a Meaningful 2016
