Tag / connected
Using OKRs to Increase Organizational Learning
This is a draft chapter from the second edition of Radical Focus. It’s coming… eventually. Hopefully soonish. Leave your wishlist for other topics you’d like it to cover, and enjoy the sneak peek!
OKRs, when done with the Radical Focus approach, are designed to create faster organization learning. To explain why, let me give you just a smidgen of learning theory from John Dewey. I promise it won’t hurt.
There are at least three ways to learn, what I’ll call instruction, action, and reflection. All three are important, but the most important is the least practiced: reflection.
Instruction Instruction is what we think when we think of teaching. Organizational leaders hire some outside person to give a talk or a series of talks about a topic. Udacity delivers online lectures. Or you buy a book on the topic! Instruction is when someone stands in front of you and talks at you, and while that has its uses, instruction is the weakest approach to education by far.
Action The second educati..
Government’s Content Strategy is the Linchpin of Citizen Experience
The future of good government hinges on content strategy.
This is important for everyone to understand because not just government employees and consultants who work with dot-gov websites are affected by the way agencies deliver content. Ultimately, content planning, organization, usability, and governance for online systems — and the human-to-human interactions they facilitate — affect the lives of people who use them every day. If the content strategy is bad, so goes the citizen experience.
We all can relate to the need for governments to deliver a better customer experience, whether it’s getting the right envelopes in your mailbox or connecting veterans with healthcare commensurate to their selfless sacrifices.
And while content strategy alone can’t fix broken business processes or improve the quality of healthcare, it’s absolutely critical to helping citizens locate, understand, and connect with public services. It’s a tool to help government employees better deliver the right i..
Ingrid Fetell Lee: Our Surroundings Have a Profound Influence On Our Well-Being
IDEO Fellow Ingrid Fetell Lee is a purveyor of joy. Not just with her buoyant personality and quickdraw collection of delightful stories. Her blog, The Aesthetics of Joy, collects the sights, sounds, sunflowers, and playground slides that can brighten a room, buoy a mood, and reinvigorate a community.
Now, Fetell Lee has curated that project into a book, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. In each chapter, Fetell Lee explores delight-inducing characteristics like abundance, harmony, and surprise and the creatives who have prioritized the benefits of joyful aesthetics in their homes, work, and communities.
99U sat down with Fetell Lee to talk about the origins of Joyful, how aesthetics impact our work performance, and how you’ve been thinking about your favorite color all wrong.
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The Aesthetics of Joy started while you were a grad student at Pratt. What was the origin of the project?
I went into Pratt with very serious intentions. I..
A UX Reading List Inspired by IA Summit 2018
The IA Summit is the leading conference for those who create and manage digital user interfaces and rich information environments. Each year, it features talks and workshops from some of the best in information architecture, UX, and content strategy.
This year’s schedule features experts such as Abby Covert, Dan Klyn, Jared Spool, and Peter Morville. The extraordinary lineup also provides a great list of recently published UX books. Check out one or more to get prepared for this year’s summit.
Save on your IA Summit registration today by using the discount code uxbooth.
Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals This is the latest from Peter Morville, who also authored Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond and Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything. The book focuses on planning as a skill and how everyone can improve, if they are ready to learn:
The principles and practices of nonlinear planning. How to grow and sustain hope with willpower and waypower..
UX in 2018: Content
In the first part of our UX in 2018 series, we explored trends that will change the priorities of developers and designers. Today, we look at what fills those designs and makes them work for users. Content has often been an afterthought in UX design, but in recent years it has taken a leading role in creating a great experience.
While nearing a graduate degree in user experience design, my professional specialty is content strategy. I have seen a rise in teams and projects using content design, structured content, or content-first approaches to ensure the development of content that can adapt to devices and new designs. Karen McGrane introduced up to COPE and adaptive content in 2012 and today Mike Atherton and Carrie Hane are teaching us about connected content. 2018 will be a year where content has a seat at the table from the beginning. It is the beginning of the end of content being an afterthought.
Two of the newest lead voices in content strategy, Scott Kubie and Andy Welfle, a..
Off-White A/W 2018
Mood board: The staging for Virgil Abloh’s A/W 2018 collection was a red room installed at the Pompidou centre. For red, read new blood. Abloh has created a cult label in a short space of time, capturing the imagination and the evolution of Generation Z. Everywhere you turn, in cities around the world from Hong Kong to Hull, you’re faced with his recognisable branded security tag, strapped across knowing shoulders. The pulp illustration on the show’s invitation depicted a suited man wielding a knife on which his frenzied eyes reflect back at him; the Hitchcockian scene suggested a sense of dread, perhaps even self-loathing. Best in show: The brand is connected to its fans – they are its bread and butter. Prior to the show, Abloh Instagrammed a photograph of a single pocket t-shirt, engineered to twist around the torso. The caption read: ‘primary show note in one iphone photo. pattern...
Louis Vuitton taps Peter Marino for its Place Vendôme homecoming
What could be more fitting as a symbol of rebirth in the City of Light, than a golden sun streaming spiralling metal rays? That’s the resplendent installation that Louis Vuitton visual creative director Faye Mcleod conceived for the façade of the maison’s new Peter Marino-designed Paris flagship. The store, which opens today, is spread across two historic hôtel particuliers – designed in 1714 by Versailles architect Jules Hardouin- Mansart – and is located in the Place Vendôme, where the young founder of the storied house first opened his trunk shop 160 years ago.
It’s a space that reflects the evolution of a house, which began as a specialist luggage supplier to aristocrats, including the Empress Eugénie de Montijo. The new two-storey boutique boasts not just leather goods, textiles, fragrance, jewellery and men’s and women’s ready to wear, but also its first savoir-faire corner, and its only dedicated home for its Objets Nomades collection of travel-inspired products. Each light-fil..
A1 Architects’ latest project satisfies a Prague family’s lofty ambitions
The concept of humble yet sophisticated luxury is essential to a recently completed three-storey apartment in Prague’s Vinohrady district. Occupying the fourth, fifth and sixth floors of an elegant 19th-century residential building, the spacious apartment showcases the crafty ingenuity of the prolific A1 Architects studio.
Based in Prague, A1 Architects was founded by partners David Maštálka and Lenka Křemenová. Both studied at Prague Academy of Arts and Design (UMPRUM) – their 2009 graduation project, a wooden tea house, was located in the garden of their house. Throughout their projects, the duo have brought a tactile sensibility and Japanese-style approach to space and structure in contemporary Czech architecture.
Inspired by their travels to Japan and their friendship with Japanese master Terunobu Fujimori, the couple use minimal and humble materials to create simple forms, enhancing the beauty of the everyday.
The open plan living area with a decorative stained glass window de..
Swede dreams: max out on minimalism at Arket’s debut store
Occupying a sought-after two-storey corner spot on London’s Regent Street, Arket is the new hotly anticipated lifestyle brand born of Scandinavian behemoth H&M. Positioning itself as the utilitarian sibling of Cos, & Other Stories and H&M, the brand describes itself as ‘a modern-day market place’ with a product offering that encompasses menswear, womenswear, childrenswear and homeware.
The doors to the first London outpost open today, to be swiftly followed by the launch of a flagship in Copenhagen next week, while a Covent Garden location is slated for September.
Two years in the making, Arket eschews trends, and instead aims to offer its customers well-made reliable staples for their homes and wardrobes. The more unusual items that pepper the shelves – such as the traditional Portuguese ceramics or ecological trainers – are supplied by an expertly edited selection of over 40 external brands.
Arket created its own scent concepts for its candles
‘We have less expertise within some..
How Senior Executives Stay Passionate About Their Work
When we talk about “learning to love your job” or “managing yourself,” it’s often in the context of junior or midlevel roles. But these things don’t stop mattering for senior executives. What aspects of their jobs are most important to them? What do they find rewarding? How do they sustain their passion for the work they do — without burning out?
Over the past few years, I’ve had in-depth, one-on-one conversations with hundreds of top business leaders, and questions like these frequently come up. I’ve identified several common themes in our talks, which I’ll share here.
Impact on society. As I was doing research and analysis for my recent book, I found that one of the best ways organizations can create a sense of purpose for their employees is to help connect their day-to-day work with the impact it has in their community and globally. People at the top also need to see the larger difference they’re making, and in some ways, because of their vantage point, that’s easier for them than..