From the category archives:

simplicity principle

Purposeful Simplicity, Unthoughtful Complexity

by Pete Abilla April 15, 2009

Most people or organizations do not, by design, create a product or service with the goal of “making the most complex product that nobody can use”.  In other words, rarely do we see purposeful complexity but instead we see much unthoughtful complexity. i am going to create the most complex product or service and nobody [...]

8 comments continue reading

Not Accountable, Not Responsible

by Pete Abilla August 9, 2008

Team size can make a big difference in the success of your service or product. What is counterintuitive for most people is that the larger the team size, the lower the likelihood of success for your service or product.  Why? Entropy can set in and large teams are inherently bad vehicles for communication. More insipid, [...]

1 comment continue reading

Visual Mismanagement

by Pete Abilla March 12, 2008
This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Visual Management Principles

A few months ago we adopted our baby girl, Mylie.  During that hospital experience, I had an encounter with a faucet fraught with featuritis and one that wasn’t humane and, during that same time, I noticed a piece of visual management in the hospital room that wasn’t effective in its intention to provide or share [...]

3 comments continue reading

Burden on People; Burden on Earth

by Pete Abilla February 7, 2008

On average, most business processes are inefficient  and create an unhealthy amount of waste: once you learn to see the process waste all around — with Lean Thinking as your worldview — you will notice overprocessing, transportation, overproduction, waiting, inventory, motion, and defects.  Aside from our processes producing waste, our processes also create burden on [...]

4 comments continue reading

Representing an Idea with Visual Identity

by Pete Abilla January 9, 2008

My daughter recently turned 10 years old.  So, because her friends have email and communicate via email, I recently helped her obtain an account.  In the process, we both learned something very important about abstract ideas and the icons we use to visually represent them. My daughter attempted to create a "Contact List" of people [...]

4 comments continue reading

Featuritis and the Customer Experience

by Pete Abilla November 18, 2007

The more I learn and practice ethnography and design-thinking, the more I notice subtle but incredibly frustrating experiences.  For example, I had a frustrating experience with a faucet that was in the hospital room where our adopted baby girl, Mylie, was born.  This faucet is an automated one — with a sensor.  So, whenever an [...]

4 comments continue reading

Aza Raskin on Google Search Results

by Pete Abilla November 6, 2007
This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Aza Raskin

In a previous post on Ethnography, I invited Aza Raskin, founder of Humanized and son of Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems — to possibly answer reader’s questions about design, visual management, ethnography, genchi genbutsu, man-machine interactions, or anything related.  Several readers [...]

0 comments continue reading

Raising Dust, Vision, and Business Problems

by Pete Abilla November 6, 2007

In the Treatise on Principles Concerning Human Knowledge, published in 1685, George Berkeley said: We have first raised the dust, and then we complain that we cannot see.   Berkeley was describing something entirely different, but his comment is, I believe, an accurate indictment of most, or all, business problems that we face. Readers — thoughts?  [...]

1 comment continue reading

Complexity: Different Ways, Same Output, or is It?

by Pete Abilla April 7, 2007

There are outputs and the processes that produce those outputs.  In a business, if there are many processes that produce the same output — that can be a silent killer for a business. Consider an inventory management system, where associates on the factory floor are to use a scanner-based tool to adjust physical inventory in [...]

0 comments continue reading

1 of 212