As the creator of a new app or website, you are intimately familiar with its purpose and you believe deeply in the value it offers. But unlike you, when a new user arrives at your app or site for the first time, he will be neither familiar with it nor confident of its value and trustworthiness. It's your program's responsibility to make the new user comfortable, knowledgeable, and confident about its purpose in the first few moments they are together.

It's very much like when two strangers meet on the street. Even if both parties have good intentions, it is imperative that these intentions be made abundantly clear and unequivocal before any significant interaction can take place. Eye contact, hand shaking, and smiling are the cues used in real life, and the web designer must provide equivalent cues on the screen. When someone sees a website for the first time, several important questions come instantly to mind. The first, and most important, question is, "What the hell is this thing?" The program should answer that question using no more than a phrase. Sometimes the product name is sufficient, but typically a subtitle or image does the work, but if your program doesn't make this clear in a glance, you have some significant design work to do. It is surprising to me how many websites fail to answer this most fundamental question.

The next questions that will occur to the user are, "What does it do?" and "Why would I want that?" At this point, some text can be used to provide answers. Lighten up the text with a diagram, drawing, or image. You don't necessarily want to burden repeat visitors with this stuff, but your software can easily tell the difference between a first time user and a veteran.

Once the user knows what the website is, what it does, and why that would be a good thing, he or she can understand the advantage of having such a product. So now she will be more willing to pay closer attention to more granular questions, such as, "Wouldn't it be easier to just use something else I already know?" Here's where the site can offer comparisons to similar products and itemize its qualities. Any potential user will be weighing the benefits of your program against the burden of learning something new. Make your program easier to learn and use, then prove it.

At this point, the new user is likely asking himself, "Is this going to cost me money?" and, "Do I have to give it a credit card?" Be up front about this now. Don't be coy by only telling the user that money is involved after they have pushed the "Yes, I Accept" button. Tell them now and disclose the full amount. Honesty now will result in more trust, which means more click-throughs and more happy users.

Everybody knows that money isn't the only thing a website can cost. Experienced users will ask, "Will it steal my private data?" and "How long is this going to take?" Once again, take the time to honestly and completely answer these questions. Give the user the option to use the program without surrendering their private information. If they like your program and use it regularly, you can ask them for it again in a month and their answer might well be different.

Good user experience design will keep any user's time overhead down to a minimum, so you should be able to give them good news in the beginning. Saying something like, "This takes the average user 43 seconds." Big picture information like this goes a long way towards assuaging the user's worries.

After your website and the new user have performed this little pas-de-deux of introduction, the human at the other end will be far more likely to end up being a satisfied, long-term user of your program.

Image source: Nightdeposits.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

In our modern digital environment, all businesses have a great competitive need for creative thinking that far exceeds our industrial forebears. In the quest for an institutional source of creativity, the brainstorming session, where several people meet to have fresh ideas, has emerged as the front runner. Brainstorming can be fun, and some prominent consulting firms have prospered proselytizing this technique, but it has a remarkably thin track record of success.

While people think and behave differently when they are in large groups versus when they are alone, I also believe that people behave still differently when they are in the presence of only one other person. This is often overlooked, yet I believe that creative people can be at their most effective when they work in pairs.

I believe that all people share these three modes of behavior: solo, paired, and group. Generally, these differences are noted only as interesting social quirks, and have not been investigated by academia or exploited by business, but their differences have important implications for the creative manager.

Brainstorming's adherents believe that a group of people can together imagine more and better solutions than any one person can alone. I won't dispute that assertion, but just because one is better than the other doesn't imply that either is anywhere close to being optimal.

A recent article in the New York Times put forth the radical idea that brainstorming might not be such a good idea, and cites recent research indicating that working solo is more productive than working in groups. The author, Susan Cain, points out that many of our greatest innovations came not from large groups of ideating peers, but from solo geniuses working in isolation. Her case in point is Steve Wozniak, the enigmatic inventor of the Apple computer.

As a former inventor who worked almost exclusively by myself, I agree with Cain. The problem is that, at the time, I would only work for myself, and like me, few independent creative people can be motivated to solve the problems of someone else's business. Unless you get remarkably lucky, you need to find a way to reliably innovate with people content to have a steady job.

When I began to consult for others, I too faced the challenge of generating consistent, reliable, and predictable imaginative problem solving. After some struggle, the correct solution finally emerged: pair designing.

This year marks Cooper's twentieth anniversary engaged in intensively creative work performed for hire, on schedule, on budget, for a wildly diverse clientele. Our work is nothing if not creative, and we consistently astonish our clients with the depth of our innovative thinking. What's more, we almost never do group brainstorming, and solo problem solving is, while not forbidden here, institutionally frowned upon as being too slow and expensive. Our ability to innovate reliably and effectively is largely due to our insistence that our creative consultants work in pairs.

The advocates of brainstorming paint a picture of innovation being like a seance, with the product team gathered around a large table, while their collective human spirit conjures up bolts of originality. As author Cain asserts, and I agree, creative thinking doesn't work that way.

Inventing new solutions to hard challenges demands intense focus, hard work, and generous quantities of critical thinking. Critical thinking is a difficult but teachable skill. It is a systematic discipline demanding good tools, skill, and practice. Just like most other things of value, doing purposeful critical thinking isn't necessarily easy or fun, but it is always satisfying and rewarding.

Critical thinking is difficult to do in large groups. Criticizing in a group setting tends to polarize it, and there are immediate and overriding political considerations of doing so. What's more, some people hate to speak out in a group, while others thrive on so doing. This guarantees that the group will be led by personalities and personal interests more than it will be by the quality of ideas.

Thinking critically is difficult to do alone for the same reason that most sports are not done alone. There isn't enough good feedback when you are by yourself. It is always easier to pace yourself by competing fraternally against another. You can see how you are doing, and you can encourage each other to new heights of accomplishment.

In my experience, the most dependable way to do seriously creative work in a businesslike manner, on a day-to-day basis, with individuals of normal capabilities, is to put them to work in groups of two. The interpersonal dynamics of a group of two are dramatically different from those in a group setting. Both partners can assert their ideas with much reduced risk of social embarrassment. One other person in the room can be a non-judgmental critic and offer encouragement for further imagination without being threatening. And just as two bike riders, runners, or soccer players will bring out the best in each other, two designers will also.

Although I believe that any pairing can be more effective than solo work or group brainstorming, we put quite a bit of effort into selecting our pairs, preferring those whose skills are complementary. Primarily, we like to pair explorers with planners. Explorers soar with ideas, flying to new heights of creativity. Planners make certain that the explorer's ideas are realistic and can be made complete.

Cain devotes most of her text to casting doubt on the millennial generation's tendency to do everything as a group. Schooled early in the political correctness of what she calls "groupthink," young people seem inclined to attack everything as a large collaborative team. I'm a big fan of teams and teamwork for getting most things done, but for innovation, give me just two people, a whiteboard, and the challenge of a Gordian Knot to untie.

Related posts

• Better together; the practice of successful collaboration
• You can't save your way to innovation
• More, better, faster: UX design for startups
• Want to learn more about how Cooper designs in pairs? Learn about our Cooper U courses

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

I've been watching the new hit TV show "Gold Rush," about amateur gold miners in Alaska and the Yukon. Their struggle to find gold reminds me of the quest for innovation in technology companies. It's interesting to compare the two quests.

Illustration by Scott Cooper

In Gold Rush, a semi-documentary, semi-reality show, big, burly men battle the elements (and sometimes each other) to find gold in the endless miles of wilderness in the 49th state. These days gold is around $1500 an ounce, so a couple of handfuls is all these guys need to have a successful mining season.

Often, all a new technology company needs to become a juggernaut is a couple of handfuls of invention, a few ounces of insight. Google, for example, didn't invent search, they simply added the brilliantly simple idea of ranking search results by the number of references they found. Building their massive search engine and finding a way to monetize their service remained a huge task, but the innovation was just a single nugget. Ironically, the Gold Rush miners almost never work directly with gold. The big problem in gold mining isn't the gold itself, it's dealing with everything that isn't gold. All of their attention and equipment is focused on the not-gold. While they dream of a few handfuls of yellow metal, their day-to-day world is dominated by countless tons of everything else. For the miners to collect a few ounces of gold, these tough, XXL guys have to bulldoze acres of forest, pump rivers of water, dig tons of rock, and move mountains of dirt. They need giant tractors and huge excavators. They need rock and sand sifting machines the size of houses. They also have to contend with trees, wild animals, harsh weather, cash flow, fickle girlfriends, and internecine friction.

Most of what goes on in innovative companies is the simple hard work of designing, coding, and deploying software. It's the quotidian blocking and tackling of everyday business: finding bugs, getting the pixels right, answering the phone. One seed pearl bright idea can occupy a technical team for a year or more, building software and shoveling an endless wilderness of bits. Regardless of the creative brilliance, building a company or a product is mostly just hard work.

The Alaskan gold is just lying there, pure, untarnished, ready to be picked up and sold. They don't have to coerce or cajole it. They don't need to identify or interpret it. Gold is easy to spot, but it rarely comes in a big, fortune-making nugget. It comes in millions of tiny flakes, deposited over the millennia in ancient stream beds.

Innovation is often the same, made up of thousands of tiny shards of creativity. Like gold, creativity rarely comes in giant dollops of obviousness. It tends to arrive in many tiny increments, only the whole of which add up to something revolutionary. So, while the miners have to discard ten-ton boulders, the gold flakes hiding underneath must be handled with exquisite delicacy.

Like mining gold, the quest for innovation is dominated by what isn't innovative. Mostly it's cubicles of conventional work, and it's easy for the delicate innovation to be inadvertently smashed by some hard-rock business process. Just like gold mining, business demands a deft combination of brute force and subtle precision, of massive infrastructure and sensitive awareness.

If you visit a gold mine, you won't see very much gold. If you visit a very innovative company, you won't see crowds of shock-haired Albert Einstein's riding around on Segways reinventing the space-time-continuum. You'll see teams of young men and women working hard at mostly mundane tasks, moving mountains of information, winnowing their way to something of immense value. What lurks there is a respectful awareness of the unique nature of creativity, and how to nurture it. Managers who want innovation don't need to demand it, they merely need to not let the mountain moving of commerce obscure the precious, delicate, dust of invention.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

The digital age changes our notions of quality, and in particular, our notions of the limits to quality. Generally, there are two limits to quality: The first limit is your imagination. If you are innovative, you can increase quality in many creative ways. The second limit to quality is what the customer will pay for. If your product is priced too high, even if it is of super high quality, you won't be able to sell many.

These two limits to quality have existed since a caveman traded away a stone knife for the first time. The more it costs to make a product, the higher price you must charge for it. Economists call the tension between cost and price, "Elasticity."

The elasticity concept has been around since that caveman, but in the digital age, its power is draining away. That's because the notion that price is dependent on cost is an assumption based on the character of industrial manufacturing.

Actually, there are two distinct components to cost, "Fixed" and "Variable." Variable costs are those tied to each individual product you make. This includes the raw materials, labor, and transportation of each object. Fixed costs are all the other costs that cannot be tied directly to a unique object. Typically, these include design, engineering, marketing, and administrative costs.

In the industrial age, just as in the days of the caveman, the variable costs were a much larger portion of the total cost than were the fixed costs. That's because design and administration is cheap compared to purchasing, transporting, and transforming steel, aluminum, glass, plastic, and energy. A washing machine, for example, might have taken a dozen engineers six months to design, but it took tons of steel, hundreds of people, railroads, mines, and factories to build those washing machines.

For the washing machine company, elasticity was strong because the variable costs were far, far greater than the fixed costs. The clever business person always paid more attention to driving costs down than to raising quality, simply because cost reduction had such powerful, direct downward leverage on price. Certainly higher quality exerted an upward pressure on sales, but it was offset by the need to raise prices to pay for it. Most customers choose a value compromise, where quality is adequate and price is low. This strong elasticity cemented into business thinking the industrial age idea that quality is expensive. But that relationship has now changed, and quality is no longer so expensive.

The digital age has inverted the relationship between fixed and variable costs. Fixed costs are now usually greater than variable costs, and this dramatically changes the role of price elasticity. When a product is made out of bits, there is no cost to purchase, transport, or transform anything! There are little or no variable costs that can be tied to each individual object for sale. Yes, the cost of transforming bits into coherent software is expensive, but it isn't a variable cost. The expense of design and programming is the same regardless of how many copies you sell.

When price elasticity weakens, the upper boundaries to quality relax and take on a different character than in industrial times. When variable costs drop to insignificance compared to fixed costs, it means that price can drop to insignificance, too. This can be seen clearly in today's market where the most successful companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, provide their products for free.

When price doesn't dominate the purchase decision, quality does. When every company's offering is free or nearly so, the customer is free to choose based solely on the quality of his or her experience in using the product.

The two limits to quality are still there, but in the industrial age, cost held your imagination in check. In the digital age, your imagination is free to expand without limit. It really doesn't matter how much time, money, effort, or imagination you invest in your digital product, as long as what you make delights your customers. They will certainly be able to afford it, so you just have to make them want it.

In the digital age the upper bounds to quality are only the upper bounds of your imagination. If you and your colleagues can think more creatively and innovate more effectively than your competition, you will succeed. The more desirable your product is, the less each day of invention will have cost you. In other words, your costs shrink to insignificance when you drive your desirability way up. Really clever post-industrial managers don't pay much attention to costs. Instead they exhort their people to better and more desirable creativity. That is the path to post-industrial success.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Microsoft's upcoming OS release, Windows 8, will finally replace a vital component that has remained largely unchanged for the last 30 years. It is the BIOS, and it has faithfully performed a simple but vital function: isolating the operating system from its underlying hardware. It quarantines all hardware-dependent code in one location with a publicly defined interface available to the rest of the operating system. BIOS is an acronym for "Basic Input Output System." It was invented way back in the 1970s by the brilliant computer scientist Gary Kildall, and was one of the more important conceptual breakthroughs that led to the success of the personal computer. Bill Gates copied the BIOS idea in MSDOS and built his company on its strength.

Thirty years is a long time even for brilliant software, and the Windows BIOS has become both a security liability and a performance limiter. It is past time for a replacement, and the upcoming Windows 8 will ship with a UEFI instead of a BIOS.

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, or UEFI, is much smarter than the old BIOS and, in particular, it can detect boot-time malware. Of course, one way to define "malware" is "any other vendor's product." Microsoft has said that it will not use the UEFI to block legitimate software from other companies, but fears are rising in the industry that it will do just that.

Because most of the UEFI needs to be implemented by hardware vendors, it will be written and deployed by third-party developers, not Microsoft itself. If these third-parties want to earn Microsoft's compliance certification, they must follow stringent guidelines. If these guidelines are followed, operating systems other than Windows 8 will not be allowed to boot up. In other words, if your computer, pad, or mobile is running the Microsoft OS, it will not run Linux or any other vendor's OS.

This is not a particularly onerous limitation for about 99% of the human race. Very few people want to mess around with their computer at the operating system level. It's complicated, dangerous, and unnecessary to do so unless you are a programmer. Ah, but if you are a programmer, it raises a significant question.

Programmers may not be large in number, but they are certainly large in influence. In the 1990s Microsoft rose to overwhelming dominance of the industry for the simple reason that it catered to the needs of programmers. What programmers believe is true affects what other people in the software industry believe, and they, in turn, influence everyone else. If programmers didn't believe in Microsoft, then Windows would rapidly lose its hegemony as a platform.

In the last few years I've seen a remarkable thing: development shops using Linux hosted on Apple computers instead of Windows machines. I wrote about this almost a year ago on my personal blog. If I were Microsoft, I'd be very worried about losing influence in the developer community. Yet, with UEFI, it seems Microsoft is making it problematic to run Linux on Windows, and this may alienate even those programmers loyal to the Windows platform.

I'm sure that executives within Microsoft look warmly on the UEFI as a powerful mechanism for combatting what they view as competition. Too bad for Microsoft that the programming community doesn't see it that way. This move could be Microsoft self-administering their own coup de grâce, sending their remaining stalwarts into the arms of Apple, and accelerating Microsoft's descent into the irrelevant.

(Thanks to @BobMacNeal for technical editing)

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

It's easy for business people to forget about the great difference between the inside view and the outside view. That is, the experience customers have with software systems is enormously different from the experience business people have deploying those systems. This means that making an otherwise good business decision about software systems can have terrible, unforeseen consequences.

The Netflix company just learned this lesson the hard way. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the progression from VHS tapes to DVDs to streaming video. Netflix built its business by renting DVDs when the competition was still renting clunky VHS tapes. Just a few months ago, the company decided it was time to get a similar head start on the next new technology, but they failed to look at the outside view when they crafted their solution.

They split off the portion of the company that provides streaming video from the older, DVD-supplying part. From the inside of the company, this looked like a really good idea and, from that perspective, it was. It allowed Netflix to offer their streaming video service to customers unencumbered by the older technology. The problem is that this doesn't reflect the point of view of their customers, the outside view.

My wife and I have been happy Netflix customers since they started. We rent DVDs and also stream video from them. As my wife so succinctly said, "I want to go to Netflix to get movies, not to one company for DVDs and another for streaming video." Her sentiments neatly encapsulate the outside view: subscribers think about Netflix as a provider of motion picture entertainment, not as a provider of some particular media.

Netflix learned a hard lesson in the importance of looking at things from the user's perspective, rather than just from their own internal one. This little hiccup has cost them 810,000 subscribers and their market cap has dropped by over a quarter just in the last three months.

In the old days when the variable costs of manufacturing dominated income statements, what was good for the company was usually good for the customer. Today, when the experience of people is far more important than the cost of raw materials, business managers need to focus on their users, their employees, and their stakeholders, and not on their internal business processes. The way to success is by making customers happy, even if it means more work inside the company's walls. The only way to please people is by carefully studying their outside point of view.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

As a business person, you may consider your software to be an operational tool, part of the sales or operations of your organization. But to your customers, it is a pipeline to your corporate soul. The behavior of your software indicates what is really valuable, what is truly important to your company, and there is really no way to hide.

Websites let your customers access your products and services, but as a side effect, they also access your corporate values. If your website is clumsy or slick, easy or confusing, it tells them a story.

Most clients hire Cooper to solve superficial problems. When they first approach us, they ask us to help make their websites “be more friendly” or their software “easier to use.” Sometimes they just want us to “make it pretty.” In every case, we find that hard to use, unfriendly, or even just ugly software is a symptom of deeper problems within the organization.If a company has a difficult or confusing website, it can mean that they have a confusing organizational structure.

If a company has hard to use software, it can indicate that there are several politically charged constituencies within the company and each is advocating conflicting requirements.

If a client’s website is unfocused, full of unnecessary features, and it forces users to enter superfluous information, it can mean that they are unclear on who their users are and have a corporate structure incapable of serving those users well.

Software has become like body language in the way it reveals your inner personality to a patient observer. Your body language always tells the truth, even when you are trying to hide an ugly secret, and it will give you away every time. You simply can’t create likable software if you are a dysfunctional company.

Source: Body Language : What Hands and Arms Say About People

If you want to improve the quality of your website, app, or software, you need to also improve the quality of your organization. You need to ferret out the people who play politics but don’t get things done. You need to squash bureaucracy that stops innovation with doubt and red tape. You need to eliminate the energy drains, systemic distortions, and toxic people that force others to act like corporate drones instead of like entrepreneurs with a vested interest in success.

You can always make minor surface improvements to software with some good interaction design, but to really improve it fundamentally, you need to improve your organization fundamentally, and that’s not really an interaction design problem.

In the majority of our engagements, Cooper ends up doing a lot more than just interaction design. We find ourselves helping clients understand their users, focus on a unifying strategy, and fashion an organization well-suited to the mission. Because our analytical methods for interaction design are so powerful, it turns out that they are also very powerful for understanding organizational structure, strategy, and project management.

It’s much harder to cleanse your corporate soul than it is to just spiff up your look and feel, but it works far better, your customers will sense the improvement, and your business will prosper.

Few of our clients come to us expecting help at that level, but all of them appreciate it once they get it. That’s why so many of them come back over and over.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his inaugural address as the 32th President of the United States, uttered his now famous phrase “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” How right he was.

He further identified his target as “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” He spoke early in 1933, during the darkest days of the American depression, when millions were out of work, no safety nets existed to help them, and there was no recovery in sight. What’s more, the specter of European Nazism, with its saber rattling, and strident, irrational racism, was waxing. In the face of these actual reasons to be afraid, Roosevelt fingered the real danger: irrational fear; fear for its own sake; being afraid simply because it’s easier than not being afraid.

Largely, the nation heeded Roosevelt’s admonition. We refused to succumb to fear, the economy recovered, we vanquished our foes, and emerged as the world leader for the rest of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, in the 21st century, we have quite failed Roosevelt. We have become a terrified nation and live in a culture of fear. We act afraid and we let baseless fear drive our choices. Mutual trust is the basis of civilization, and our nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror is unraveling the fabric of our society.

You can see the telltale traces of our fear everywhere. Everything we buy comes with voluminous safety instructions exhaustively detailing how it all might conspire to hurt us. The panoply of products and services with which we surround ourselves collectively laugh at our foolish anxiety. Every product we own is plastered with scary warning labels exhorting us to not act like an imbecile or we might suffer.

All of our cars have utterly useless alarms on them. They go off accidentally and annoy entire neighborhoods, but they don’t deter professional car thieves.

Our roads are lined with warning signs telling us to be careful even though such signs not only don’t work, but are dangerously distracting.

Even though violent crime is way down our mass media over-hypes every crime into an epidemic, every mugging into a crime wave.

Our airport security strips us of all dignity while performing its useless charade of frightening cowardice.

But that isn’t what I want to talk about. I want to talk about passwords. More specifically, I want to talk about hiding passwords with asterisks when we have to enter them on websites.

Our software programs conceal our passwords with coy little asterisks and our trust in each other erodes. We begin to suspect our co-workers, fellow transit riders, and even our family members of trying to steal our identities. It is another palpable example of nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, and this one is right in the backyard of interaction designers.

I have no complaint against passwords. They are useful tools to protect our data and our online accounts. It’s just that software should not hide my passwords from me, and only in extremely rare cases does it need to hide them at all.

The only reason why passwords are hidden is because we have become a nation of terrified little mice, riddled with chickenhearted fear, suspicious of every innocent shadow. Every time a website conceals a password from the person who is entering it, we witness a small victory for fear itself, and a minute but very real rip in the fabric of our society.

While identity theft is a real problem, there is abundant evidence that it comes from institutional sources: from hackers breaking in to corporate databases or from gross security leaks on a mass scale. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that individuals are stealing passwords by over-the-shoulder spying.

Recently there’s been a long discussion on the IxDA list regarding the proper way to conceal passwords. Some brave voices have suggested that concealment may not be necessary. They are far outnumbered by those who mindlessly accept that fear itself must triumph and everyone is out to steal your Amazon account and crack into your tweet stream. Bah!

I’ve been trying to imagine a scenario where passwords really need to be concealed. I couldn’t imagine one. I thought of a few, but they were all based on the assumption that people mostly stood around, waiting to catch a glimpse of my password so that they could...what? Send me spam? Post embarrassing pictures of me on Facebook? I’ve got news for them: That train has left the station!

One of my colleagues suggested that entering a password during a presentation would unnecessarily reveal your password to the audience. While I can’t argue with the specific case, as an interaction designer it bothers me. What kind of messed up software would force a person to enter a password at the start of a public presentation? What kind of badly designed software would not allow the user to request that his password be concealed just this one time?

And anyway, what would happen if the audience did see your password? It takes far more courage to show your vulnerabilities than it does to conceal them. Showing your strength in this way is a better deterrent to petty crime than any defensive measure is. If you doubt this, ask any police officer.

In my 1999 book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, I point out that remote alarm buttons on automobile keyfobs are an utterly unnecessary feature that surely had its roots in some engineer saying, “Hey! Look what I can do!” Thereafter, every remote entry fob has had to have the alarm button so as to not appear to have a deficient feature list. I have no doubt that the asterisk-covered characters in a password field had identical origins. Some engineer figured out a clever way to subclass a text entry field to put the moral equivalent of tailfins on his program, and ever since then others have been following suit to not appear deficient.

Normally, such mindless behavior would disgust me, but in this case it angers me, too. Because it isn’t just simple bad interaction design, but it is a bold assertion of that nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror of which Roosevelt warned. It is another tiny crack in the wall that keeps us from barbarianism. Every time you put a concealed-password field on your website, you degrade our society, debase our culture, and demonstrate your irrational fear; your fear of fear itself.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

The old saying, "History repeats itself" seems to be true in the recent history of book selling.

When the big chain stores of Borders and Barnes & Noble moved into town, the local independent bookstores all quaked in fear or squawked in high dudgeon about how the soulless giant franchises were ruining the business.

Borders failed to compete with Amazon and has since filed for bankruptcy

But the chains taught the independents a valuable lesson: that some books were a commodity. The price and availability of New York Times bestsellers was more important than was the sales clerk's expertise.

The weaker independents closed their doors while the big chains grew fat and happy. The surviving independents continued to disparage the big chains, but the chains delivered a better experience. They added cafes, benches where you could read for hours, and offered a much larger selection of books.

Then the World Wide Web came along, and after some initial jockeying for position, Amazon emerged as the Internet bookseller to beat. Now the shoe was on the other foot. The big chains squawked in righteous rectitude about how they couldn't compete with a company that didn't need to invest in bricks and mortar.

But Amazon taught the chains a valuable lesson: That all books were commodities if you already knew what book you wanted, and it was easier to purchase online, and the online vendors could stock far more titles. What's more, the supporting information on the Web was far more valuable than anything a harried, youthful sales clerk could offer.

Both Borders and Barnes & Noble took huge body blows as the new business model assaulted them, but the Web delivered a better experience. Barnes & Noble created their own online presence and has managed to stay in the game. Borders, however, not only failed to grasp their role in their brick-and-mortar world, but they foolishly gave their online business to Amazon, and so filed for bankruptcy last month.

It seems to me, with the exception of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the players in this little historical reenactment are unclear about their role, and keep trying to read from someone else's script. Bezos appears to be the only person with a firm grasp on what he does for a living, and selling books is not it.

Jeff Bezos sells customer service. Amazon is attentive, easy, and the answer is always "Yes" to whatever question a customer might ask. Returns? Sure. Availability? No problem. Free shipping? That can be arranged. The only thing Amazon can't provide to the customer is a warm, well-lighted nook, surrounded by good books, knowledgeable staff, author signings, good wireless Internet access, and a cup of cappuccino.

And right there, in a nutshell, is the solution for the brick-and-mortar crowd: provide the customer with the things that Amazon simply cannot provide, and offer it with the same level of exquisite customer service that the Bezos Army does.

Keplers bookstore in Menlo Park, CA has fought off online competition with great service and customer loyalty

The local independent bookstore can't compete with Amazon on selection and availability, so don't bother. If I owned a small bookstore, I'd put several computer kiosks right in the middle of the store, permanently connected to Amazon. If, while sitting around sipping a macchiato and talking to a friend, you learn of some interesting book, you can turn to the computer and instantly research it, and then order it.

Rather than seeing Amazon's strength as competitive, brick-and-mortar stores should see it as liberating: they no longer have to maintain such a large, expensive inventory of books or maintain distributor relationships to order requested books.

Instead, the local store can offer something unique and desirable: a physical place for readers to go where they are supported and welcome, and where the books on view are personally selected, intimately displayed, and available for perusal. No internet company can provide that.

No physical store is ever going to compete successfully with an Internet-based company on breadth of selection and encyclopedic knowledge. So physical stores that want to survive will offer the things that the Internet cannot provide.

A brick-and-mortar bookstore should be a designed to be the greatest place for a bibliophile to be, rather than the best place to purchase books, which is only one of the things that readers wish to do.

Many readers want a comfortable place filled with books where they can socialize with other readers. They want to find out about good books that are worth reading, and to share their enthusiasm for good books that they have discovered. They want to talk to others about books they have read, or things they have learned from books. Readers love to look at books, hold books, browse books, experience books. Buying them is not necessarily the central act of loving books.

A book lover's haven would be like a clubroom or cafe, warm, inviting, with good lighting and soft chairs, strong wireless internet support, and many book shelves of fascinating, wide-ranging titles. Yes, there would be books for sale, but the main focus of the store wouldn't be to sell books but to make book buyers happy.

Obviously, this requires a different business model, but that isn't such a crazy idea. After all, buying books online is a new business model. I don't know what that model would be, but I can imagine some viable candidates:

1. Visitors pay a modest cover charge when they enter.
2. Visitors pay a monthly fee, like a fitness club.
3. Book publishers could subsidize the store.
4. Revenue comes from sales of coffee, snacks, and internet access (the Starbucks model).

In addition, the store could generate revenue from several other new activities that haven't existed before. These could include:

1. A concierge service to receive and hold shipments of books for readers who aren't at home during the day and cannot receive shipments at work.
2. Most books today are ebooks, and the store could download them faster for a fee.
3. The equivalent of Apple's Genius Bar, where, for a small fee, an expert would help the customer fix or adjust their Kindle, iPad, or other eReader.
4. One of the best things about local brick-and-mortar bookstores is that they can host special bibliophile events. Author signings, book clubs, and publisher presentations can all be lucrative events for an enterprising store. These are not new ideas, but charging for them is.

What is different is that the bookstore is now not making the majority of its revenue from the sales of books. Instead, it's making money from being a great place for book aficionados to gather and be physically present.

Lending libraries used to provide a similar service. The card catalog was a resource for research, and the reference librarian could always arrange an inter-library transfer if the obscure volume you needed was in the next county. As a child and young man, I remember spending many delightful hours in various public libraries. Only relatively recently have I found myself whiling away my bibliophile hours in bookstores instead of libraries. Maybe what we are seeing is a back-to-the-future return to the library along with the decline of the retail bookstore.

I won't mind losing the old brick-and-mortar bookstore as long as the benefits it delivered are still readily available. It would only be another example of history repeating itself.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

What's wrong, you might argue, with keeping costs down? Quite a bit, it turns out. If your objective is to design a product people want to use, or to invent something brand new, you must embark on a journey of creativity and innovation. That might seem like normal, every day business, but don't make the mistake of trying to run your creative organization like a conventional one.

Business sage Peter Drucker asserted creative employees "are not labor, they are capital." This has profound implications on the way you should manage and account for your business. As Drucker also asserted, "What is decisive in the performance of capital is not its costs, but its productivity."

In other words, if there is something you can do to enhance the creative abilities of your people, it doesn’t really matter how much it costs, or how long it takes. If it results in a successful invention, or a compelling design, that’s what really counts.

Business people trained in industrial age thinking cut costs from force of habit. After all, expense reduction was an excellent strategy when manufacturing costs were dominant; they are easy to measure and provide instant benefits. In the post industrial age, manufacturing costs are neither dominant nor elastic, so reducing them reduces your quality without improving your desirability. Today, trying to make your product cheaper just makes it frustrating to use and unlovable without making it any cheaper to buy. It’s no longer a valid competitive strategy.On the other hand, making a product that people love is an incredibly powerful weapon. Most people have figured out that it takes creativity and innovative thinking to make a product that people can fall in love with. The problem is that cutting costs immediately stifles any creative impulses your staffers might have. Real creative product development is a fitful exercise in doing silly, unreasonable things. As Scott Berkun describes in his excellent book, The Myths of Innovation, almost all game-changing, brilliant ideas seemed embarrassingly stupid at the time. Unfortunately, it means that you must give your people the freedom to spend plenty of quality time with truly goofy ideas. While the majority of those goofy, unproven thoughts will prove unworkable, your next conceptual breakthrough might be among them. I guarantee, though, that it will initially appear to be just as silly and unrealistic as the rest.

A tightly constrained problem set can be invigorating to creative thinking. Minimal tools and resources often bring out the best in people, but any externally imposed restriction sends a message. Arbitrary limits levied by management for misguided economy sends a very negative message.

It's just human nature; when you impose a deadline, a budget, or any resource limitations, you are really saying, "This is of marginal value so I'm restricting it." Because you limit new exploration but not the exploitation of known moneymaking activities, you are further declaring, "Don't waste time on any thing risky and unknown." People hear these tacit messages loud and clear and put their time into already proven activities, inhibiting any significant effort towards real innovation.

The counter-argument to giving freedom to creative people is they will fritter it away enjoying themselves but not moving the company forward. This can be a valid criticism in companies that lack a worthwhile corporate goal. However, if creative people know what that goal is, they will work hard to achieve it.

What business leaders must do is make certain creative people know the goal. They must hear it stated clearly, unequivocally, boldly, loudly, unanimously, and frequently. They need to know what successfully achieving the goal looks like. They need to be publicly and positively acknowledged (rewarded is good, too) when they advance the business mission.

You can't save your way to creativity. Creativity isn't necessarily expensive, but it's a human rather than industrial activity, and when you put external cost constraints on it, you put it in an artificial box that simply kills it. Creative people need unfettered time and attention to solve difficult conceptual problems.

In the business lexicon, time is money. That is, the longer it takes to do something, the higher the total cost. To bring costs down, industrial age business doctrine says to do things faster. But as Drucker says, productivity is more important than cost reduction. So, while time may be money, moving faster doesn't mean you are necessarily moving toward success. Moving quickly in the wrong direction is far worse than moving slowly in the right one.

There are two primary imperatives of the go-fast crowd: staying to a predefined schedule and avoiding wasting time traversing blind alleys. On the surface, both of these tactics seem eminently sensible. The truth is both of them are kryptonite to creative thinking. Creativity is spontaneous and cross-disciplinary, unpredictable and elusive. It requires unconstrained time to ponder, play, consider, and experiment. It doesn't necessarily take a long time, but if you try to put a time limit on it, you might as well drive a stake through its heart.

In a recent blog post, I discussed the problem of all good ideas seeming like bad ideas in advance. This makes it virtually impossible to avoid wasting time going down blind alleys. You can theoretically save money by not spending much time and effort on those dead ends, but you cannot detect those dead ends in advance. In practice, you simply have to spend some time exploring each alley to learn if it's a good one.

While it just seems like good, common sense business to keep costs down, this is merely a mirage, a chimera, an illusion left over from the rusty age of manufacturing. There is no longer any connection between what your product costs to make and the price at which you can sell it. Your employees are not turning raw materials into products, and cost accounting no longer works.

Your smart people are your capital, not your factory labor, and as Peter Drucker said, it is their productivity, not their cost that matters. The better you communicate the company mission to them, and the more you encourage them to spend time and money to innovate, the faster they will do so.

Related Reading

• Innovation is a waste disposal problem
• Change is good only when it's great
• Will Ford learn that software isn't manufactured?

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments