Posts by: Mike Rivera

Explore Pixar‘s Relationship with Their Customers

Explore Pixar‘s Relationship with Their Customers

Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar, was asked to comment on kids as consumers. Specifically, the question asked about Pixar’s views on the trends they see amongst their five-year-old demographic (skip to the 24:10 mark in the video). His answer: Five year olds actually haven’t changed as much. Clearly, the teenage world has changed a lot more because of the way media is spread. So that’s actually the bigger change. For the children, we haven’t seen much. In terms of the way we think about our stories though, we don’t segment them in that sense. That is, we do make movies that…

Book Review: Remote: Office Not Required

Book Review: Remote: Office Not Required

I read Remote: Office Not Required over the weekend (it’s a fast read) to see what I could learn about working with remotely located coworkers. I came away with a simple change of perception that will likely change the way I operate in the future. Our company has two offices which, in a sense, makes us a remotely located group. I say ‘in a sense’ because those offices are, at most, 30 miles from one another. Before reading the book, the idea that this small distance made us a remotely located organization seemed far fetched. If I needed to talk to someone face-to-face,…

Elevate your understanding of the Jobs-to-be-Done Four Forces Diagram

“Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New-Product Adoption” by John T. Gourville provides support and context to better understand The Rewired Group’s Four Progress Making Forces Diagram. In particular, the article provides context for the push and pull concepts within the four forces diagram outlined below (and includes some of Clayton Christensen’s innovation concepts aded for good measure). The article explains the psychology behind consumer behavior and how sellers (or product designers) can tap it to increase sales. Some takeaways: The likelihood that someone will buy is based more on perceived value than actual value. Consumers use…

My First Concert

I headed to my first concert three days before I turned 20 to see PJ as they were breaking big on MTV. Because I designed promos and ads for the events council at CU I was able to get in early and free. I stood right in front of Stone Gossard (he’s the one with the long hair… oh, wait…). I have two vivid memories of the event. One, the hearing loss from the terrible opening band who set their amps to 11. Second, a recollection of the scene in the room after the show ended. Since I stood in…

Change and the Habit of the Present

Christina Wodtke gave some needed depth to an old cliché: people don’t like change. Whether or not change is adopted, she argues, is not determined by a simplistic and innate dislike for new things. It’s determined by how well the change is communicated and how smoothly people transition to it. Wodtke writes: “…when a big change comes, the end user is focused on what they have lost: productivity, comfort, familiarity. And the user weighs that loss as three times more important that any gain that company professes to offer.” Her thoughts are like those that underly the ‘habit of the…

Bad Feedback

I visited Ustream’s website and needed to update my password. The form they offered to do so indicated that what I entered wouldn’t work. The error it gave me said I used an illegal character, but they didn’t indicate what character was the issue. I’m left to guess what character is problematic. Why not tell me? Why set my expectation that I was entering a valid password (“Password strength: high”) next to the form field only to find out that it wouldn’t work? A better site experience would work like this: as I’m typing, the site tells me an issue…

The Fundamental Higher Ed Website Issue: Centralization vs. Decentralization

You can’t talk about centralization unless you first talk about how things currently work under a decentralized system. So I’ll address that first. Many traditional universities (most? all?) take a decentralized approach toward their websites, both in terms of creation and maintenance. It’s thought that a decentralized structure where each division, school, college, department and administrative unit effectively controls their space and content on the web is the best way to manage the overall site. Core web teams tend to be small given the size of a university’s online presence so the thinking is “why not shift maintenance of each…

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