Scott Cook from Intuit gave the opening plenary for CHI 2006. I had heard a lot about the user-centered process that Intuit has been famous for. So I was hoping to get an inside glimpse to their ideas and design process.
I cannot say I was entirely disappointed, Scott did talk about it, infact he talked about a lot of things sometimes in more detail than I would have liked. But overall I would think that the opening talk served its purpose - as per the CHI 2006 logo, it talked about inventions at Intuit and elsewhere, it informed us about a host of ideas and above all it did a great job in inspiring many of those present in taking design, usability, innovation, yada yada more seriously. Seriously enough that we may survive the rest of the conference :)
Moving onto specific examples he gave, I could not help realizing that story telling is often the most powerful way of capturing audiences' attention. I guess all famous and charismatic leaders know this, the audience in the bottom of their hearts is still like a curious child, wanting to hear a story that they can relate to, tell others about. It is always easy to tell someone a story you heard about good design than it is to talk about just good design principles. And Scott knows this, very well.
The stories he told covered the wide gamut of fields, beginning right from the invention of Scotch tape in the 20's to the story of the humble trucker who changed the way the world did business and from which Maersk as we know it today was born.
Like a good inspirational speech should be, Scott's speech did not fail to touch upon the importance of failures and he even cited them within Intuit. All in all I think he gave a fitting start to the conference. Lets hope the conference lives up as well!
No comments:
Post a Comment