It’s Sort of Like This…
I’ve seen it happen many more times than once.
At the end of a presentation in a briefing or a workshop, where a topic is shared that is new, conceptual or maybe even complex; the presenter will ask “Any questions?”
And it happens…where one would expect that there might be at least a few (or possibly many) questions, there is silence.
It’s possible that it was simply a job well done. The presenter might have been effective at communicating the content. But every so often, if you watch the room closely, you’ll see a number of the participants looking around trying to figure out if they were the only ones who didn’t get it.
My belief has been that no one wants to ask the obvious question that they worry would make them look dumb. Maybe there’s a boss in the room, so that makes it even harder. But when it happens, it’s as if a collective fear descends and everyone swallows the questions they really want to be ask.
And this is unfortunate because one of the things that I’ve come strongly to believe in my time at IBM Interactive is that clarity is really important. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that creating clarity around concepts or goals or problems or users or any of many other multitudes of things is one of the most important enablers of a successful experience design effort.
I Think We’re Doing It Now…
And this is what I feel like we are doing now. We’re attaching social to all of these things…social media, social computing, social networking, social commerce, social customer support, social marketing, social learning, social business, etc. without stopping to be really clear about what it means for something to be “Social” (or how it is different or supposedly better from the non-Social version of what came before).