Boredom is Good

What do you do in your spare time? Do you have spare time? How do you come up with new ideas?

 ” No slack: In the last decade, many companies have become obsessed with becoming lean, with wringing all of the slack out of their operations and processes. The problem is that when you wring all of the slack out of a company, you wring out the innovation as well. “While the folks in R&D and new product development are given time to innovate, most employees don’t enjoy this luxury. Every day brings a barrage of e-mails, voice mails and back-to-back meetings. In this world, where the need to be ‘responsive’ fragments human attention into a thousand tiny shards, there is no ‘thinking time.’ And therein lies the problem. However creative your colleagues may be, if they don’t have the right to occasionally abandon their post and work on something that’s not mission-critical, most of their creativity will remain dormant.” This points to the depth of cultural change that must take place in order for innovation to take hold in a large organization. It’s not enough to just “bolt on” an idea management system; if employees don’t even have time to think creatively, how can they come up with breakthrough ideas to populate such idea repositories?” 

Three impediment to innovation  by Innovation Blog

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The Best

What is the best? Is the best marketshare? Mindshare? Good enough? Optimal? Cost effective? Luxury? Tolerant? Cheap? Viral? What do you mean by best?

How do you find the best? Here is what happens in the software world:

1. A person comes up with an idea
2. He runs with the idea
3. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it doesn’t
4. If it succeeds, he rings it for all it is worth

Are you a lucky one? Have you won the lottery more than once? Is every idea you have the best one?

Read between the Lines

Why is it that the design does not look like you expected? You gave a picture of what you wanted. What you got back was exactly the things you asked for but … it just does not look the same.

What don’t they see? Why can’t the developer get the UI just right?

Luke W believes it is all in the whitespace:

“What’s missing is what’s invisible: alignment and whitespace.

Often, user interface elements are not aligned. What’s centered in the design doesn’t appear that way in what’s implemented. What was vertically or horizontally aligned in the design appears ragged.

Padding, or whitespace, often fares worse. In some places, padding is gone; in others, there is too much. Padding is set to different values, leading to columns and rows of varying widths. Changes in padding and alignment can negatively impact readability and obscure visual relationships that clarify how to use an interface.

Why is this the case? It’s not that the developers deliberately modified the design. It’s not that they necessarily consider alignment and whitespace to be unimportant. It’s just that these elements in the user interface are often invisible to them.

Development teams are responsible for putting interactive features and content into a product. Empty space is neither feature nor content. Therefore, it is not a requirement. For a designer, however, whitespace is often just as important as the content.

As a designer, I spend a lot of time adjusting whitespace to enable effective scanning of content. I also spend a lot of time refining alignment and padding to establish the right prioritization between user interface elements. I utilize both of these design elements to guide users through the interactions on a page. I use them to communicate what’s most important, what’s related, and what needs attention. For designers, these are key requirements of effective communication. And yes, there’s a lot of evidence that shows what’s invisible does make a difference. “

Here is the article: http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000097.php