A little while ago I ran a survey with my mailing list to find out what people were struggling with most, and one comment stuck out in my mind: “A lot of the skills (presenting, storytelling, etc) seem important and connected. If there was a single lens to do a several of these I think that would be fantastic.” Absolutely they’re connected. Writing and speaking are complementary - comedians create a feedback loop between ideas and performance by jumping between the two. So let’s take one...
6 months ago • 2 min read
The secret ambitions of Phillipe Petit...? The Amazon Effect Ever heard of ‘The Amazon Effect’ in usability testing? Picture this: you’re testing an e-commerce website for a client. But right when the participants you’re observing are about to buy something, they open Amazon in a new tab. When asked why, they say: “well I always check prices against Amazon before buying.” I’m not here to tell you about The Amazon Effect, but how one might use the story of The Amazon Effect. What if...
over 1 year ago • 2 min read
Big in Japan In Japan, the way people read is fundamentally different to how we read in the west, and it's not just the vertical orientation of the lines. You can see sense how reading is different in the design of newspapers. INFORMATION OVERLOAD! (for westerners) The writing systems used in East Asia have turned people into expert information scanners; they can digest very dense information very quickly. If you give a presentation in Japan, it's quite common (and expected) to put everything...
over 1 year ago • 1 min read
Jane Austin is one of the most inspiring product design people I've ever met. She's a sharp product thinker and builds happy, productive design teams (great interview about her journey here). Jane and I helped to build a hundred strong design team together. She asked me recently why I wrote my new book, Death by Screens: how to present high stakes digital design work and live to tell the tale. Here's an edited version of that conversation. The idea for the book What was the trigger for...
over 1 year ago • 17 min read
Education, fables, game design, astrophysics, writing, story structure: they’re all connected by a useful principle you can use to improve how you communicate. Deliberate failure Our schooling has really internalised the idea that the correct answer is the only one that matters. As I write, my twelve-year-old son is being tested again on some topic he told me that he already knows. As teachers in the UK like to say - you can’t fatten a pig by measuring it. As an adult, I learned that failure...
almost 2 years ago • 1 min read
Today's tip is about how you go about helping to facilitate good feedback from stakeholders. Let's go! We teach children something that we often don't stick to in our adult lives: think before you speak. I'm as guilty of not following this rule as anyone. I'm from an outspoken and (sometimes brutally) direct Dutch / Welsh family, and the son of a radio presenter. I didn't have any trouble offering my opinion until I got a bit older and considered the true impact of my words. We can't make...
almost 2 years ago • 3 min read
In your long, creative, and prosperous design career, you'll end up explaining particular topics to your colleagues over and over again. What we'll cover: finding the right story to tell about a topic so that you grab their attention at the start. In Pacific Northwestern Canada, there's an archipelago of islands called Haida Gwaii. The indigenous people there tell of their ability to speak the language of ravens, recently lost to the effects of colonialism. Ravens are a central part of the...
almost 2 years ago • 4 min read
There's no one perfect way to create a presentation, or indeed, any kind of content-based work. But there are approaches we can borrow from other disciplines. In the world of fiction writing, there's the idea of 'planners' or 'pantsers' (as in, flying by the seat of your pants). Planners meticulously plan the structure of their work in an outline before they start writing (Will Self is one example); pantsers are those who just go for it and write (George RR Martin). Both approaches have their...
almost 2 years ago • 2 min read
Hey folks. Yesterday I got to the final proof of the book. So close! In preparation I've improved how these articles appear on the web, do take a look and share (if there's anything you've enjoyed reading, that is!).Anyway, this week... useful lessons from Breaking Bad, Southpark, and what not to do, courtesy of Game of Thrones. Read on the web The showrunner of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan, knew that there's a really easy story-telling trap you can fall into. He would begin with a very...
almost 2 years ago • 2 min read