One of our current projects it to design or re-design the user interface for the next generation of one of our client's products. While talking with the designers and engineers, you wonder why the people with the deepest understanding of the product aren't always the most qualified to design the interface.

The biggest challenge of designing the UI of a complex system is that as you become comfortable and knowledgeable of a design, the harder it is for you to accurately assess how simple and intuitive it is. How do you account for this? By constantly bring in fresh eyes at all aspects of the design process. The longer you've been toiling over a feature, the less likely that you yourself notice a glaring design flaw.

Lovely article in the New York Times business section on Sunday. Rite-Solutions, a software company, has built an internal marketplace to allow everyone in the company to invest in good ideas.

At Rite-Solutions, the architecture of participation is both businesslike and playful. Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's internal market, which is called Mutual Fun. Each stock comes with a detailed description — called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus — and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in "opinion money" to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock and, better yet, volunteering to work on the project. Volunteers share in the proceeds, in the form of real money, if the stock becomes a product or delivers savings.

This intrigues me both for its democracy and for the discipline of requiring people with ideas to write a clear, easy-to-read description of their project.

"We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here," Mr. Lavoie, the chief executive, said during an interview at Rite-Solutions' headquarters outside Newport, R.I. "At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius."

Great ideas are equally possible coming from the bottom up as the top down. In particular, those "bottom" people have a lot of hands on experience with the way things actually work.

"There's nothing wrong with experience," said Mr. Marino, the company's president. "The problem is when experience gets in the way of innovation. As founders, the one thing we know is that we don't know all the answers."

I've worked at companies where a senior executive is vigorously pursuing an idea that most people know is doomed. No one person is willing to share the bad news, but what if he or she had to confront a slumping share price for their "expect-us"?

Funny thing happened to me last week on my way to an oil change - my car's engine was destroyed.

It all happened in a blink: I stopped by Jiffy Lube on my way to the bakery and swung up to the garage entrance, first in line. If you've ever had an oil change, you've probably experienced the old "preventative maintenance" up-sell: a technician pulls you out of the waiting room, gives you a grim, disappointed look, then explains the various parts of your car that are in severe need of service. In the past, I've been good at standing up to these automotive authority figures. I'd mumble "no thanks, maybe next time," not daring to look into the eyes which so clearly said: Don't you care about your own safety? This time, however, I broke down and gave the go ahead for an engine flush. I was assured that any sane car owner would have this procedure done every 15k miles; here I am at 80k without my first flush.

I knew something was wrong when I saw them pushing my car out of the garage half an hour later. I was assured it was no problem; they just needed to dry off my spark plugs. Two hours later I was calling for a ride.

All of which would have been a small inconvenience if I hadn't gotten a call the next morning letting me know they would need to replace my engine. Clearly something had gone terribly wrong with that engine flush.

I should say: I have little reason to gripe about Jiffy Lube. They are covering the engine replacement and a rental car. That said, there are a few lessons Jiffy Lube management might take from this situation:

• The edge cases matter. A while back we wrote (here and here) about analysis of anomalies and the opportunity for learning. One point that applies in this case: Collectively, outlier customers provide a service: they stress test the product and highlight unrealized strengths or weaknesses. In its desire to relentlessly upsell, Jiffy Lube has extended its service outside its comfort zone to a point of weakness.
• Data can make you smarter. I had an interesting conversation with the outside mechanic that is installing the replacement engine. He said I was lucky. My engine has a known problem with high levels of sludge build-up. He has seen other instances where an engine can be so full of sludge that an engine flush is incapable of breaking through the muck (like clogged arteries, I imagined) and the result is ruin. I get a refurbished engine with 80% new parts in place of an engine that was like the heart of an overweight cholesteral-holic. Maybe Jiffy Lube shouldn't be indiscriminantly upselling every customer. It wouldn't be difficult to build some filters into their system for high risk maintenance.
• Communicate with unhappy customers. Most companies would benefit from a simple alarm system for catching and responding to customers with particularly bad experiences. Something to appease them before they tell all their friends, family, and co-workers about their crappy experience (heck, they might even blog about it). All I ask as a customer is: a) recognize that you have created an inconvenience for me; b) convey that this isn't a status quo situation; and c) assure me that you will make me whole. Jiffy Lube wasn't effective in communicating any of these. They had an odd nonchalance that suggested this happens all the time, no single point of contact to speak to, and no apology for the inconvenience.

Just found this (thanks instantcognition), which offers examples of poor charting design along with a discussion of how to make the charts better. Both the good and bad examples are repeatable in Excel.

This is a video created entirely using Excel bubble charts. It illustrates flows over the course of the year between two starting states and four ending states.

Click picture to view video

I want to stimulate discussion on creative charting methods using common tools, Excel or otherwise. If you have an example of a creative use of charting, let me know and we can all get a little better at illustrating information.

The business world is awash in piles of words mis-classified as PowerPoint presentations. Here are three slides from a webside development vendor's pitch:

Even at a distance, it's clear you wouldn't want to sit through this. Creating a compelling presentation is tough. There are, however, a few things that can make a big difference for your audience. Before you save your PowerPoint file as "final" and send to print, here's a checklist of things that you should always do, do more of, do less of, and never do.

Always...

• Tell a story. Great presentations tell a compelling and cohesive story. Stories have themes, characters, plotlines, and a message.
• Build a flow. Try reading your slide headlines. Do the slides connect? Do they tell a story? Don't be afraid to shuffle your slides to find a cleaner way for the concepts to fit together.
• Provide a roadmap. Its easy to lose an audience if you have a complex argument or storyline. Give them sign-posts that let them know where they are and where they are headed.
• Banish slides to an appendix. When I build a presentation, I will inevitably end up with slides that don't fit neatly into my story. Find a home for them in the appendix; it's the "green room" of your presentation where potentially useful material can hang out until it's needed.
• Simplify. Your story can be simpler. Your slides can have more whitespace. Be ruthless in cutting.

More...

• Pictures, including full page pictures. Cliff Atkinson of the beyond bullets blog is a big proponent of pictures in place of words and offers a good, though extreme, perspective.
• Changes of pace. Long, data intensive presentations easily become monotonous. Break these up with different kinds of slides, multimedia content, or audience interaction.
• Animation in slides. While animation can be a distraction, it does have its place. In particular, if you have a complex slide, consider building the layers of information. It forces your audience to focus on just one part at a time.
• Quick punchlines. It is always tempting to develop a presentation that gradually builds to an exciting conclusion. Save it for your great American mystery novel. Your audience is impatient to get to the point. Provide it to them up front.

Less...

• Words. People use extra words to cover up when they don't know precisely what they want to say. Enough said.
• Bullets. A list with more than five bullets is beyond most people's ability to process or remember. Long lists can be broken into subgroups.
• Bullet-points. For short, simple lists, remove the bullet points.
• Stock clipart: Microsoft has been generous enough to provide a world of clipart fun. Avoid that world as much as possible. Clipart is mostly useless filler.
• Animation between slides. Unlike in-slide animation which can focus your audience, animation between slides is simply a distraction.
• Capitalization. There are rules for when to capitalize. Capitalizing Almost Every Word in a Sentence is not One of Them.

Never...

• Use ScreenBeans. Check this out: I found the ScreenBean store. For just $59.95, you can get a whole package of digital ant people running around in business settings. Trust me, there are cheaper ways to ruin a presentation. On that note, I found this slide in a presentation entitled: "Effective Presentation: Using Microsoft PowerPoint." Ironic?

We've blogged recently about the rich data available from the census bureau and the ability to visualize it with low cost GIS tools like Google Earth. Our friend Ducky recently released her mash-up of Google maps and census data that shows the potential for dynamic and informative maps that are easy and free to use.

This data is available to everyone, but compare the data you find at the census bureau to some of the maps at Webfoot. The census bureau presents a bunch of numbers and Webfoot made them come alive. At Juice, we call this "democratizing data" and it shows the true potential of the next generation of web tools to empower your organization and put the data at the hands of the people that need it. Check out Absolutely Google Earth for a source of tools and resources to do the same.

Sometimes when you're starting a presentation, you need a little help getting over the hump in deciding how to present data and concepts. The following PowerPoint deck contains a collection of ideas and visuals that can help when you're brainstorming.

100 PowerPoint Ideas.ppt

I hope this is a valuable resource for presentation writers looking for inspiration, widgets, nice-looking charts and graphics, and ideas on structuring slides.

It's organized into four sections:

Widgets: Little graphics that help call out an idea or show where you are. Examples include: Harvey balls, bullets, brackets, arrows, and outline styles.

Charts: Different ways to use PowerPoint's built-in charting to create nice looking graphics. Examples of column charts, pie charts, commented pie chart, multi-column charts, waterfall chart, radar charts, and representing data with chart areas.

Graphics: This includes tables, value chains, linked chains, representing three dimensions of value, showing market forces, project structure, project timelines, segmentation schemes, ranges, positives and negatives, product roadmaps, flows, processes, Venn diagrams, filtering opportunities, and showing market space.

Slide Structures: Ways of framing the content of a slide, including personas, multi-charts, section breaks, and calling out important concepts.