Don Norman at Business of Software 2009

Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down.

Which button do you press?

Now, spend five minutes watching this video of Don Norman speaking at Business of Software 2009:

The whole video’s over an hour long, but in the first five minutes you’ll learn:

• Why half of people would press up, why half would press down, and why everybody thinks their choice is utterly obvious.
• Why you have to design products for how your customers are, and not how you want them to be.
• Why making your product usable, understandable and emotionally satisfying are never your goals. They are never sufficient. And they’re not always necessary.

Didn’t watch the five minutes? I didn’t think so. You’re busy. You’ve got meetings to hold, e-mails to read, tweets to write. Five minutes is a looong time.

Those are lousy reasons.

Five minutes *isn’t* a long time. And even if I’m wrong and you did watch five minutes, I bet you didn’t watch the whole video. I didn’t. For all I know, the editor accidentally spliced porn in at minute 34. Like you, I’m just too busy to spend an hour watching it.

But we should have watched it and, deep down, we know that. If you’d watched the whole hour, you would be able to create better software. You’d have learned new things, you’d have had been entertained, and you’d be – just possibly – a better person because of it.

Here’s a second chance. Go and watch the video.

…

I thought not. Again, you’re just too busy. But if you spend all your time on the here-and-now and the urgent, you’ll never have time to do the important and the interesting.

Which is why you should carve some time out of your schedule and come to Business of Software 2010. You need to create a bubble away from your routine meetings, e-mailing, coding, and hiring and firing. Spend two and a half days talking with 300 of your peers, and listening to wonderful people like Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Dharmesh Shah, Peldi Guilizzoni and Eric Ries.

The early bird discount expires on July 2nd. One hundred and twenty five people have already booked. I hope you can join us in October, in Boston. Visit the Business of Software conference web site to find out more and book your place.

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Comments

[markee174]

Will you be following Don's advice and printing the BoS name tags people wear round their necks on both sides?

[Neil Davidson]

Yes!

[Jack]

This was an awesome video (as was the other one you sent an email about, some time back).

I had to take a break at the 38 minute mark to get some work done, but I came back to it this morning to finish.

If this is the caliber of speakers you consistently get for the conferences, I'm going to have to find a way to eventually attend.

[Tim]

See, I would watch it, but I don't have headphones or speakers. Plus getting information from a video is far harder than getting it from text. Give me a transcript and I'll happily read it.

[Accessibility matters]

I'd love to watch it, but the quality's too poor for lip reading and there don't seem to be subtitles available.

Embedded video is probably the single least accessible online communications medium. But I guess you're too busy to transcribe 5 minutes of content, so I'll never find out what you wanted to communicate.

[PLD - Lead Tracking Software]

This video is great. I think it was very helpful. (and I don't need a transcript) Only watched the first half but very interesting.

I think Don Norman is right and the approach to our customers does need to change. And yes I agree we need to approach them as intelligent human beings.

Thanks for these post. I am working internationally now so obviously I can't attend these conferences, but the highlights are wonderful. Ty!

[nalply]

I second that accessibility matters. What if Dan Brown spoke Cherokee? Then almost everybody would have requested a translation. So I request a transcript, as I am Deaf.

Thank you for providing a transcript.

[Paul D. Waite]

I'm just going to add another whiny voice here, but I would watch it except I'm on my iPad and the video doesn't seem to work there.

[Igor Kryltsov]

Why do you publish videos on blip.tv?

I am not speaking for everyone but I load videos and print blog posts to read on a train to/from work. It is relatively easy to do with youtube - .flv download and convert to .3gp. With this blip thing I only note - I missed another good piece of info just because it is too much troubles to get it when I allow myself to be distracted from work (on a train).

Look at This week at Startups to get an idea.

:(

[Keith Collyer]

Another way of solving the twisting badge problem - and probably more useful (and maybe even cheaper) that printing the name on both sides - is to suspend the badge from the two uppermost corners rather than one point in the middle. It can still twist, but is much less likely to do so. This also works for the increasingly common type of badge holder that has a pocket for storing stuff with the name card inserted in the front.