Right away, it is apparent that this book is a different kind of career guide. It frankly tells you that building a successful career will be hard, requiring a lot of work and what you will hope are intelligent risks. That said, the first thing that struck me about this book was how well laid out it is. It’s crisp, clean and makes sense. This clarity of thought is further reflected in the great writing all the way through the book.

Using the success strategies of entrepreneurs they have watched (and been themselves) in Silicon Valley The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha guides the reader down the path of a better career.

Here are three things I really liked about the book.

Flexible Persistence

They call this “ABZ Planning”, but I prefer the term Flexible Persistence. Easier to remember and enact.

What they advocate here is to start out with a solid plan in mind, but remind you that some of the greatest opportunities are things that will deviate from that plan – be the a new career opportunity or unexpected customer feedback – and that we cannot stick too rigidly to our plan. We have to be ready to adapt and, as they put it, pivot.

You have to be ready to stray from the plan when it is appropriate. I do not recall seeing this in any other “career” book, and I really liked it.

Focus on the Steak, Not the Sizzle

Immediately after college, I was very focused on using my design skills. To be fair, I’d just spent all that time in class working on them. It took me a few years and projects with varying degrees of success to realize that function was more important than form. Reid and Casnocha address this as it relates to one’s personal development, but the example they use is from Reid’s experience with Apple’s product division:

“…product management — mattered more than any user experience or design. You can develop great and important user interfaces…but if customers don’t need or want the product, they won’t buy.”

The authors use a wide range of examples from their pasts to make their points and this one struck a chord with me. Being a designer in a technical field, I’ve really had to work to keep my focus on delivering something a user will want, instead of something that looks good, does cool things and passes the design review team. It’s so easy to get caught up with the bells and whistles.

Ask Better Questions to Get Better Answers

I cannot recall having seen a better compilation of advice on how to ask better questions to elicit more effective answers. First meetings with clients for anything connected to the online world are often 80% determining what it is that they want to do. Determining their goals – and exposing weaknesses and potential problems – is a huge part of any project, so the authors’ focus on how to ask more incisive questions was incredibly welcome.

They put these forward as a better way to gather information from your network, which is also greatly helpful, just not the first way I thought I could apply it. Here’s what they suggest:

1. It’s a conversation, not an interrogation. Don’t just ask question after question, that shuts the other person down. Instead, go in to the meeting with the goal of finding out certain things. In my own experience, this has brought up a great deal of relevant information. Things that do not always seem relevant may be, or they may point at something else worth noting.
2. Start with a wide focus and then narrow it. Especially for nebulous issues, your goal is to figure out, “What is a good question to ask?” You do that by getting a firm handle on the situation and then drilling down.
3. Frame and prime. Not getting the information you need? Ask open-ended questions like, “What are the biggest issues you face in communicating with your customers?” Alternatively, suggest possible answers to give a better idea of what you have in mind. “Company X faced a similar situation and had great results by doing this…”
4. Follow up and probe. Really listen to the answers. Why was something risky? What does “not a lot” mean? Answers are often qualified or red flags appear as you listen. Dig until a deeper answer takes shape.

Groundswell by Forrester Research’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff is an evergreen book on planning social media engagements for companies of any size. What is a Groundswell?

“A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than traditional institutions like corporations.”

They do a great job of focusing on customer relationships instead of technology, and that’s where they really get it right. While there are some dated references – the book was written in 2007 – the content really stands up because they focus on planning at a strategic level, not on how a specific technology or service can best be used.

While I usually do book summaries by outlining three big ideas that really stand out to me, the structure of this book leads me to use their basic strategy as an outline from which I can hang the pieces I really found important.

POST Strategy

The book is about customer-based strategy, which they define using the POST acronym. (Please note, I don’t feel like I am giving away the book’s biggest selling point here since they freely offer it on their blog: http://forrester.typepad.com/groundswell/2007/12/the-post-method.html)

P is People. It’s easy to get caught up in making sure that your organization is represented on all of the social media technologies, but that is short-sighted. Instead, focus on your customers. What would they want to use? You have to meet them on their turf if you expect to get a legitimate conversation going.

The authors briefly outline creating a “social technographics profile” and hint that paying the Forrester team to develop one for you is the way to go. To be fair, they do a very good job at outlining the many types of users. That seems unnecessary for most uses. Ask yourself two questions instead:

• Who is my target audience?
• How are they most likely to use social media?

There will likely be more than one type of user here, but what you are really looking to do is indentify the people you are targeting and then figuring out where they are likely to be online. In their people-centric approach, they point out: “Your brand is what the customers say it is.”

O is objectives. This is where the book is strongest in my opinion because their advice is simple. Pick a small goal that you can build upon and get going! Make sure it’s something that you can measure, even if your statistics are a little creative, like “ideas for improvements suggested by users every month”.

S is Strategy. In order to make sure you meet your objectives in both the long- and short-term, they wisely recommend stepping back and asking yourself what it is you hope to get from social media and how you can get it. They advocate small goals that are flexible and can be built upon. Further, they make the great point of monitoring progress so that you can make use of the aforementioned flexibility.

Things will go wrong. There will be negative feedback. How will you deal with it?

Later in the book, they add that you will also need to get project buy-in at this point. There may be strong resistance to this new change, so they offer suggestions on how to deal with it. I found their suggestions a bit light, and would instead recommend Marshall Goldsmith’s seven phases of a project from What Got You Here Won’t Get You There:

The Seven Phases of a Project

1. Assessing the situation
2. Isolating the problem
3. Formulating
4. Woo up – To get your superiors to approve
5. Woo laterally – To get your peers to agree
6. Woo down – To get your direct reports to accept
7. Implementation

Failure often occurs by skipping steps 4, 5 and 6. Look to pre-wire your efforts by getting early buy in from marketing, the C-suite and the other parties likely to be affected.

Li and Bernoff make the excellent recommendation of getting someone in a position of power — not someone with the available time — to run the initiative. This will ensure that it is taken seriously and will help smooth some of the friction that will come when an internal change is spurred from customer feedback.

Additionally, they again provide a nice little framework of testing, measuring the results and responding appropriately.

T is Technology. Importantly, this piece is last. This would seem counterintuitive to many planning a foray into social media, but it’s not the technology that’s important. It’s the relationship with your customers and how you will build it.

In Clermont, our social media guideline is to continue the conversation online that our elected officials began offline. We use social media to do two things:

1. Broaden our reach, putting our local cable access shows on YouTube for example.
2. Getting news to citizens the way they want to receive it by doing things like alerting them to news items on our websites via a link from our Twitter account.

Groundswell is a very solid and actionable book. I liked that it could very quickly be skimmed to pull out the meat and that they offered a good deal of case studies showing how companies and customers met and built relationships online.

Martin Lindstrom takes the consumer’s side in Brandwashed, detailing the tricks and practices used by today’s marketers. He builds from elementary psychology tools that have been used for ages to the aggressive data mining used by today’s online powerhouses.

The data mining portion is as fascinating as it is scary; covering all ways we unwittingly allow marketers information about ourselves. He adds a lighthearted touch by outlining a hypothetical shopping trip in which he deceives the store’s data mining strategies by tricking them into thinking that a white male from Denmark is a black woman, simply by purchasing things he’ll never use. It’s a nice way to bring the reader back after scaring us with the knowledge that some stores use tracking chips on their shopping carts to plot customer’s paths. (By doing so, they can figure out how to slow us down, therefore making impulse buys more likely.)

Not to discount the importance of data mining in site development, I was also struck by how many of the methods discussed could easily be implemented through solid user experience design.

Somatic Markers

A “somatic marker” is a short cut the brain makes to cut down on excess thinking. It’s a hypothesis put forward by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio that is essentially the same thing as a heuristic ; a well-worn path in the mind that is repeatedly used because of its past success in decision-making.

In much the same way we tend to have a favorite dish at a restaurant or we always fold towels the same way, we know what works and have to challenge ourselves to try the process differently. There’s a reason that successful websites share a lot of the same traits: they work.

Bestseller lists make decisions easy

Remember the first time you walked in to one of the big box book stores? The immense amount of books they had was overwhelming. While it was great that all these books were on hand, where would you possibly start?

That’s the point of bestseller lists, Lindstrom explains. He details how he had the employees of one such book store remove all but one table of books from the front of the store. They were allowed to put a dozen different titles – stuff that they liked or was popular – on that table. The result was a two percent (which he assures us is a big number in book sales) increase in sales.

Bestseller lists are an analogy to “top links” on a website. The idea is to display a mix of what is popular and what we want to push at the user. It’s why Amazon lists things like “People who looked at this ultimately bought…” and “People who looked at this also looked at…” Whether it helps us navigate the wealth of options or simply allows us to do what everyone else is doing, these short cuts make the user’s experience easier.

A smaller box

In a similar story, Lindstrom discusses a focus group he ran in which he asked participants to choose a chocolate, either from a box of thirty or from a box of six. They overwhelmingly chose to pick from the box of six, again because they were not overwhelmed by options and could more easily eliminate some options and come to a decision.

I took this as an excellent analogy for the importance of taxonomy on a website. Following Steve Krug’s rule that a user will click as many times as necessary as long as they feel like they are on the right path, it is important to remember to do the hard work of organizing our content. It’s easy to slack off when there is a search box on the site. The goal should be to have the search box as the safety net, with user testing and thoughtful content analysis as the preferred path.

Writing a book called How the Mind Works is an ambitious undertaking, and Steven Pinker has definitely succeeded. In a thick and dense book, Pinker puts forth a rigorously researched theory that the mind works much like a computer does, with current items (what you are thinking about right now) up on a “desktop” and other items available in the “hard drive” (the sum total of your knowledge). His evolutionary model explains how the mind came to be and how the “programs” our mind uses can even be strengthened through repeated use in the same way that a muscle will grow if you lift weights. He then continues with the evolutionary model to show that our mind is adapted to a world of foraging hunter-gatherers but is now saddled with trying to make sense of today’s information overload.

The book is entertaining, engrossing and incredibly educational. Here are three things that really struck me in terms of how the mind relates to websites.

Geons.

How does the human brain recognize objects? If you had only seen a photo of a suitcase exactly from the side, would you only recognize suitcases in profile? If it was lying on its side, would you still recognize it?

In addition to some neat tricks like being able to mentally flip and rotate a shape in your mind, a prevailing theory also states that we compose every object we see as a collection of some basic shapes, called geons. Several of these geons (see below) can come together to form anything: from a suitcase to a car. In much the same way the letters of the alphabet can be combined in countless ways to form every word or sound imaginable, geons can construct a mental object in our minds.

The psychologist Irv Beiderman has fleshed out….an inventory of simple geometric parts that he calls “geons”…Beiderman proposes twenty-four geons altogether. Geons can be assembled into objects with a few attachment relations like “above”, “beside”, etc. [In much the same way words are built from the 26 letters in the alphabet, shapes can be built from the building blocks of the 24 geons.] p. 270

People can make complex things out of a group of small, basic parts. Why would a web page be any different? Search boxes are usually at the top right, logos usually the top left, etc.

With this in mind, we can see that everything from a suitcase to a website is simply a collection of parts. For our user to recognize them, they simply have to follow a general pattern that the user has already noted on countless other sites. It’s not at the framework level that we should look to engage our users, they need to be in an environment they are comfortable to explore.

Everyone basically believes that they are right.

Call it irrational optimism, but humans are hardwired to believe that we are right by default. This mindset has allowed mankind to survive through dim circumstances and to accomplish things others did not think possible.

But it has a drawback: when we always think we are right, we quickly become discouraged when that assumption is challenged. This is the driving force of all usability because the user always has to feel like what they are doing is correct. Steve Krug touches on this in Don’t Make Me Think: it matters less how many times a user has to click as long as they feel like they are on the right path.

I challenge the notion of not making people think. My goal when designing a website is not to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator, that’s unrealistic. Instead, make it easy to use and encourage the user to become a bit more immersed in the site. As long as the small challenges I provide easily enough mesh with an average users’ sense of how the site should work, the site will be successful. I will have engaged the user.

Thinking is Hard

Steven Pinker likes to bake bread. At one point, he was dissatisfied with the bread he had been baking, so he tweaked a few things. The resulting batch was much better, so he was happy. Did he go back and rigorously research which of his tweaks had made the difference between good and bad bread? No. He just ate the good bread.

The mind is powerful because it is ruthlessly efficient. Do you remember every word from the last conversation you had? No. But you do remember the point of the conversation and any outcome it may have had. The brain does not waste energy on things it does not need to spend time computing, if it did, we would be overwhelmed as soon as we woke up. Instead of just checking the time on the alarm clock, you would be enthralled with its color, how it works and more.

After the invention of the telegraph, there were people who claimed that the short messages would be the death of thoughtful communication, which they claimed were hand-written letters. Similarly, there are those who bemoan writing content for the web. They want to write a detail-packed essay and it’s my job to convince these writers that web readers will be looking for succinctly written copy that is broken up with sub headings to make skimming it easy. (As mentioned above, of course we both think our conflicting methods are the right one.)

The goal needs to be to engage users thoughtfully. Give details for dense information, but maybe break it up into a bulleted list. Don’t bury a phone number in the middle of a paragraph. Evaluate the message you want to convey, and then determine how to present it in a concise form.

To imply that we do not want the user to think is too simplistic. We just do not want the experience to be too complicated. We want to engage the user. This does involve a bit of thinking, we just need to make sure that they can get the information they will be thinking about in as easy a process as possible.

David Brooks’ great new book The Social Animal argues that psychology is missing a lot by only focusing on an individual’s mind. He presents a strong argument that we’re missing a vast amount of important information by not paying attention to two other key drivers of a person’s mind:

1. Their social interactions
2. The messy and more abstract nature of the unconscious mind

The conscious mind is like a general watching a battle from on top of a hill, while the unconscious mind is like thousands of scouts reporting back important information. Too often, we overlook the importance of our unconscious mind as well as the importance of our relationships with others. A human is more than cold logic, they are the ambiguous and messy collection of subconscious thoughts and relationships that cannot be neatly summarized.

Instead of a GPS, the mind is an EPS, emotional positioning system. All previous experience and knowledge act as the maps, coloring your possible choices with excitement, fear or nervousness based on the ways your mind wants you to react.

Here are three points in which the book shows us how it could help guide user experience with the web.

Reinforcing the Argument of Heuristics

A heuristic is the well-worn path our minds will always try to revert to in order to solve a problem. It’s a comfortable groove for our thought to travel along. Every time I go to the grocery store, I park in the same basic section of the lot. I do not even have to consciously plan to guide the car there any more, it’s that ingrained. Years ago, it occurred to me that if my car is always in the same area, I would save myself the embarrassment of wandering around the parking lot with a cart full of groceries.

That is a heuristic: a repeated, experience-based process that I can mindlessly follow in order to get a desired result.

The more neural networks perform the same activity – driving a car, brushing your teeth – the stronger they become. And of course, we find it easier to rely on the stronger connections, so we use them more, which reinforces and strengthens them further.

Domain-specific learning is often the easiest for us. This is any learning that is done within the context of an area in which you already have a good deal of expertise, where a professional chef would have a much easier time figuring out a complicated recipe than the average person would.

Brooks cites a study in which chess grand masters are given quick glimpses at a chess board, and then asked to describe where each piece was. They were remarkably accurate. Does this mean that a chess grand master has a photographic memory? No. They were able to reconstruct the boards by placing them in the context of a game, another example of a heuristic.

When the boards were flashed at the grand masters with the pieces in a totally random order, which would in no way correlate to a chess match, the masters’ ability to reproduce the board dropped off significantly.

“The mind stores certain ‘if…then…’ rules of thumb, which get activated by context and can be trotted out and applied in appropriate or near-appropriate circumstances.”

He goes on to detail how children need to feel that they can explore with the comfort of a safety net of security at home with the parents. A parents’ job then is to match discipline with warmth, depending on the need of the situation. He then subtly points out that these learned traits do not really change much as we grow up, implying that there is still a lot of truth in the idea that we will only tentatively explore new ideas as long as we have a secure safety net.

As a designer, it’s really pretty dull to always have the search box on the top right corner of your site, but that’s where people are going to look for it. When I was immediately out of college, design for its own sake was my goal, but I have learned that a truly successful website is the one your users enjoy. And I still believe that you can break the mold a bit, enough to challenge and engage your user.

As a Social Media Strategy Guide

All of us would like to think that we are rational and intelligent people, but we would also have to admit that we continue to do inexplicably dumb things. Brooks discusses the “rational animal” that the Enlightenment wanted humans to be, but points out that we’re just not a bunch of Spock-like creatures.  Instead, what separates man from animals is our ability to understand, relate to and empathize with each other. He quotes scientist Ulric Neisser , who thinks he has identified an anatomic distinction in humans:

“It is worth noting that, anatomically, the human cerebrum appears to be the sort of diffuse system in which multiple processes would be at home. In this respect it differs from the nervous system of lower animals. Our hypothesis leads us to the radical suggestion that the critical difference between the thinking of human beings and of lower animals lies not in the existence of consciousness but in the capacity for complex processes outside of it.”

He goes on to explain that we really cannot help but be drawn in:

“Your unconscious wants to entangle you in the thick web of relations that are the essence of human flourishing.”

How to use all of this to advantageously market to people via social media is really much better summed up in the different people involved in a Malcolm Gladwell Tipping Point, what this book adds is a deeper understanding of why we want to connect with others online, even through superficial relationships like Facebook friends.

Brooks argues (though I am not entirely sold) that Americans are an individualistic but basically trusting society. The point he seems to be driving home is that humans all have a basic belief that other people are generally good. My issue with this is that there seems to have been a big backlash against “faceless corporations” lately, at least from the rational, conscious part of people’s minds. This leads me to think that there is an innate distrust of any company or organization, especially since the recent recession.

So what do we as social media and web planners do? My argument would be to humanize our brand as much as possible by emphasizing great customer service that makes users really feel like we care. Secondary goals would be the focus on “putting a face” on the brand through the use of photos and videos that capture the happy experience of using that brand.

Not So Easy a Caveman Can Use It

In the book, Brooks makes a somewhat controversial use of characters that we can at times relate to and other times dislike, but they serve as his narrative means of bringing the reader through all of his findings.

The main character is Harold, whom he covers from his inception to his death. While Harold is in high school, Brooks discusses the stages of learning.

1. Mastering the material, in which Harold basically just reads up on his subject and does what he can to master the facts.
2. Processing what you have learned. Here, Harold goes through a journal-writing exercise in order to straighten out his thoughts and to either solidify or discard weak connections.
3. Revising, Harold continues to muddle through what he has learned.
4. Making everything coherent, the final stage in which Harold lays out all that he has learned. It is here one would make a final point about what they have learned.

There’s a great quote by designer Joshua Davis:

“We shouldn’t assume that the general viewing public is an idiot. We should try to evolve the medium by making intuitive systems that educate the user – not design to what level we think they can handle”

By knowing how people learn – the process, that a safety net of known options leads them to be more comfortable trying out some new things – is where user interface design can really continue to evolve well. It’s so easy to get caught up in the idea of making sure that your site or app looks the same on a variety of screens that we often forget that our goal is to make it so awesome that a user wants to use it.

Every website, social media property or web app has a goal: get the customer to buy something or learn about what you are trying to do. Our job then is to take that goal, put it in an enticingly-challenging situation and to continue to adapt to make sure that we are meeting our goals by helping the user meet theirs.