Innovation — What do you imagine? If the montage in your mind’s eye includes drawing boards groaning under the weight of colorful post-it notes, robots moonwalking on the work floor, and beer fridges by the water cooler, you may be conflating ‘modern’ and ‘meaningful’.
If innovation were a cold, heavy, glossy product you could buy, it would be a collapsible machine-gun that fits your pyjama pocket. While I don’t endorse the civil ownership of guns, I find a pocket-sized gun the perfect metaphor for innovation — chaos-on-demand in your pocket. When do you whip it out? What for? Profound questions — both of them.
When The Engines Of Innovation Misfire…
Many a starry-eyed solopreneur and many a Saville-Row-wearing CEO will tell you: innovation is risky.
Google Glass found this out. Tata Nano found this out. The Modobag® suitcase, ahem, we’ll find out. Google Glass was ahead of its time, Tata Nano was near impossible to manufacture without cutting corners. And the Modobag® suitcase — we shall see.
UX designers are no less vulnerable to the seductions of innovation. Even those at Google.
This screen is taken from a blog that discusses the UX mistakes made by tech’s big boys.
A first-time user of Google Translate, staring at this snakey icon — that’s the picture of cluelessness.
So what, you say? Well, Google (or a product as elegant as Google Translator) can experiment, get it…….
