As discussed in Practical Product Management, there are six methods of research: three are best for finding problems; three are best for evaluating solutions. An experiment is the best tool for evaluating usability—or is it? Check out www.interface-research.com. This site compares 10 different aspects of usability for a web site and asks which you prefer. At the end, they show you their results so far. Pretty clever. This form of research is called a choice model because it forces the respondent to choose. After all, you cannot choose both answers.

But here’s the question: is the survey telling us which is better or telling us which is popular? And is popular better? Britney Spears is popular. (For better, check out The Alternate Routes.) I’m not convinced that the popular choice is indeed better or if it is just what we’re used to.

If you have a new user interface or new web site design, why not use a method like this to test before you poke it out online? For that matter, you should test positioning, product names, your marketing collateral templates look-and-feel, and so on. Do you?

UGH! I'm working on the annual survey data with poor tools. In some cases, the Vovici software is all I need. For anything more I have to suffer pivot tables in Excel. I guess I really need someone to give me a copy of SPSS. Meanwhile, I've never used any data mining tools that truly present information clearly.

Check out the data visualization of the fund-raising for our upcoming presidential elections. And if you haven't played with Hans Rosling's census data visualization, you really should; he conveys really rich data in a simple format with Gapminder.

Wouldn't it be great to have a dashboard for business information?

I’ve encountered some fairly cool products in the last few weeks... just in time for Christmas. Here are some ideas for your gift list.

You can never go wrong with books by Bill Bryson. Everybody loves his writing. I bought a dozen copies of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid ($11) for friends and family. This book is just completely great. If you or someone you love grew up in the 60s (or grew up in the Midwest), buy this book. Also check out A Walk in the Woods ($8) about the Appalachian Trail and In a Sunburned Country ($10) about Australia.

And if you haven't read it, you should add The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott to your business book list.

Everyone who has attended one of my seminars knows that I’m a gadget guy. Want to know if a new gadget idea will sell? Take pre-orders! This vendor is taking pre-orders of his reproduction of the Flux Capacitor for delivery next year. Who doesn't want this? Even if you don't need a time machine, you definitely want to check out the Garmin Nuvi 350 ($350) GPS to get you from here to there. Garmin offers different models with different features but no matter which you choose, the Garmin software is certainly better than what came with your car and is infinitely better than the Hertz AlwaysLost.

Regular readers of my blog know that I recently won the Software Idol contest at Business of Software 2007. It was great to speak at the conference; winning a Nintendo Wii was icing on the cake--and dang it, that thing is just fun. My wife and I are now "pro wii bowlers" even though I have a wicked slice (or whatever you call it when the ball curves to the left at the end of the lane). If you have a friend or family member who already has a Wii, you probably know about Guitar Hero III but it is almost impossible to find. Some other great (and easy-to-find) products you might consider are:

• Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. I can’t believe this is as fun as it is but basically you relive the six Star Wars movie in the world of Legos. It should be stupid but somehow it’s a blast. Using a “force push” to trash a droid is just so… satisfying!

• Rayman Raving Rabbids 2. Talk on your cell phone during the movie until the manager catches you. Slap the kids on a car trip to keep ‘em quiet. Play the guitar part for "Papa’s got a brand new bag." Shoot invading rabbids with a plunger. Silly simple games for all ages including an easy mode for little kids.
  

• Also think about a second Wii Remote and a rechargeable Wii remote Charge Station for two remotes ($30) so you’re always ready to play.

If you have a digital camera, you definitely need to buy a Shutterfly calendar or photo book. I love the 12x12 photo book for vacations and family events but your mom might prefer an 8x11 book or a 4x4 brag book.

It’s probably time for everyone on your list to get a new iPod. I recently bought the 160 GB Apple iPod Classic. The 80-gig version will hold 20,000 songs—and only a complete musical nut (like me) has that many—but if you’re storing video, you’ll need the bigger one ($250 and $350). The Apple iPod Touch is totally cool if you don’t have much music; an 8-gig will hold about 2000 songs, or roughly 200 CDs. ($300).

And of course you will want to load your iPod with music from The Alternate Routes. Ignore the review on iTunes; these guys are great, especially the bass player. You probably should get a tee-shirt too. Buy the album from Amazon or iTunes.

Alan at On Product Management want to know what makes a good “vendor blog”? He writes,

Like many things, there are good blogs, bad blogs, and good and bad corporate blogs. I dislike blogs that are blatant marketing pitches, and it’s clear that readers don’t like them much either.

That's for sure! When will marketing and sales departments understand that no one likes to be pitched? Pitches in blogs and other online forums are like a stranger running into your house and yelling BUY BUY BUY at you!

Alan asks,

What works for you and your blog?

I started the productmarketing.com blog originally to store deep-dive articles on topics from our training classes, ideas that required more analysis than a brief answer in class could provide. Originally the main page was a diary pointing to new content on my site (and others). I found myself writing article-length email replies to a question from class and realized that I should write the article once and distribute it on request. “Here’s the link!”

When I put all the articles online, Google had a field day. All that rich content in one place made the productmarketing.com website pretty attractive to search. The articles provided lots of great, rich content while the blog kept the content fresh. You can read all the details in our web history article.

My challenge of late has been to allocate blogging time with a travel schedule that is virtually 100%. I find it’s really hard to get my mind quiet enough in the cacophony of traveling life to write anything at all. That’s a real challenge when your company’s thought-leader has a “real job” too. Like so much of product management, it can be frustrating when the people you need for content are motivated to do something else.

My current strategy is to schedule a morning for writing before my week starts. I keep a folder on my desktop of topics that need exploration and then just write to whichever topic is most interesting to me at the time. I also need to remember to check to see if I’ve already written an article on the subject! There’ve been times when I say, “Hey, wait a minute! I’ve written this before!!” Silly me.

Our content management software has a handy feature. I can schedule when a post will appear. On those rare days when I’m particularly prolific, I can write a series of posts and then schedule them over the next few days and weeks. I try to post on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I have a bunch of stuff.

Our marketing people know the number of visitors to the site and which articles they read but I’ve never been much of a measurement person. I know, I know; it’s heresy... I'm supposed to be.  As much as I know that I’m supposed to use data, I learn through anecdotes. I measure success when people come to my seminar because they read an article or post on the website. That said, our annual product management survey reports that only 9% of product managers use RSS readers while 84% read our email newsletter.

I think Jacob Nielson is right. In Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, he concludes,

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

A blog is a great place to post short notes but schedule some time to fully explore an idea in the form of an article or webinar. If you don’t take the time, you’ll get shallow postings instead of thorough, valuable content.

Have you ever tried to be funny in email? It’s hard to do. We use smileys or other clues because the written word lacks visual clues. Maybe that’s why video is so popular.

Teachers know that different kids learn in different ways. There are some basic learning styles:

• Auditory learning occurs through hearing the spoken word.
• Visual learning occurs through images, demonstrations and body language.
• Kinesthetic learning occurs through doing, touching and interacting.
• Read/write learning occurs through reading and writing.

(I don’t know if 'read/write' was listed last because it is least effective or if this bullet was added afterward by an editor. The article says there are three kinds of learning but lists four. Hmm.)

I recently spoke at the Business of Software 2007 conference. The organizers taped my speech and posted it to Google video. Those who have read my articles will find the theme familiar: product management is how a company defines and delivers products to market in a consistent, repeatable way. Afterwards, about half the conference visited me in a “bird of a feather” get-together to talk about the role of product management in tech companies. Questions ranged from how to find good product managers to how to do product management and also how to sell product management as a valued role to tech companies.

Watching a video isn’t necessarily better than reading; it’s different. But it’s hard to convey humor or emotion in a blog post. Hmmm, maybe a video is better.