Commoncraft Blog

Explainer Tip: Make People Care

The following post is a part of a series called "Explainer Tips" where we share lessons we've learned in crafting explanations.

Looking back on my education, one thing becomes clear: I was a not a good math student. What I've learned since then, is that I had the potential to enjoy math, but there was a mismatch between the way I needed to learn and the way I was taught. I wrote about this previously in a post called "Talkin Bout My Education." Math turned me off because it seemed like memorization and formulas with no context. I had a hard time seeing the big picture. Had someone been able to help me care about math, to see why it mattered, I might not have recurring math-related dreams to this day.

This brings us to one of the big things we've learned: Explanations should make the audience care. Without this focus, an explanation is more likely to fall on deaf or daydreaming ears. In my case, math classes seem to drone on and on because I never fully understood why it mattered.

When it comes to your explanations, remember to spend time on building context. Early on, give the audience a way to see why their time is well-spent listening to your points. If you go too quickly to the how-tos and click-heres, you're likely to lose some people.

Of course, we're believers that brevity is important as well. There's a balance - you may not be able to get into as many details if you focus on context. From our perspective - context wins. Here's why: making people care is the hard part.  Time spent on making people care creates motivation that can last long after the explanation is over.  Once someone believes that the subject matters to them, they're more likely to listen to the explanation and go looking for details.  And that's what making people care is all about - helping people develop a new interest.

So, how do you make someone care? Future posts in this series will help to answer this question - it's one of the biggest. For now, I'll start with this tip:

Make a connection to a real world problem.  For example, to explain a new mobile phone service, don't start with features or shortcuts. Instead, tell a story about a real world problem that everyday people experience.  For example, you could start with "If you take the bus, you know how frustrating it can be. You never know when it will arrive." These words say nothing about a mobile phone, features or brands. Your introduction is focused on the context and the problem.  By making statements that reflect real-world problems, the audience can quickly say "I know that feeling!" Helping them with this realization is the goal.

This way, your explanation has a hook - something that grabs the attention of the audience and helps them feel that the explanation could be worth their time.  And ultimately, that's the value proposition - spend time with this explanation and you'll learn about something that applies to your life.

Next up in the series: Stop Talking About Technology

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Video: Twitter Search in Plain English

Today we released a new video called "Twitter Search in Plain English"

The video uses an metaphor of the small town of "Twitterville." The town has an election and the people use Twitter to track real-time news, a hashtag to organize discussions and trends to find new information.

While it wasn't our intention, the video matches closely with the events currently taking place in Iran, where people are using Twitter to organize and share news about their disputed election.

If you know people who get Twitter, but don't understand things like hashtags and trending topics, this video will help.

Watch Twitter Search in Plain English.

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BarCamp Seattle is this Weekend! (June 13th & 14th)

If you live in or near Seattle, try to make it BarCamp Seattle this weekend.  Common Craft is a sponsor - I'll see you there.

What's BarCamp? I suppose you want an explanation in Plain English?  I'll try, but here's the Wikipedia page. 

People have gotten tired of the normal conference format.  Speakers on a stage, everyone else quiet. Everyone knows the best stuff happens over lunch or in the hallways.  BarCamp is an event that happens in cities around the world that offers a different, more open and free flowing take on conferences - known as an unconference. People (often geeks, entrepreneurs, artists, etc.) come together for 2 days. During that time, participants volunteer to contribute in some way. Often these are workshops, talks, demos, discussions, etc. BarCamp is all about having fun and doing what feels right. 

Here are the details:

Register Here

Sat Jun 13, 10am-5pm.
Sun Jun 14 10am-1pm.

Adobe Conference Center
801 North 34th Street
Seattle, WA 98103

Follow @barcampseattle on Twitter and use #bcs09 in your tweets.

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A Better Way to Learn Chemistry

If I could have learned chemistry this way, I might have discovered a career in science.

Via Daily Dish

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Meet Us at NECC (National Educational Computing Conference)

Sachi and I will be attending the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) later this month in Washington DC. This will be our first time attending the conference, so you may see us wandering around with lost looks on our faces.

Because it's such a huge conference, we're hosting a Tweetup [?] so that we can be sure to meet you. Come say hello!

 

Date: Monday June 29th, 2009

Time: 4:30-6pm

Location: Old Dominion Brew House - Convention Center (we've reserved a room in the back) Map

You can RSVP using Upcoming.org

We're @commoncraft, @leelefever, @sachilefever on Twitter.

 

 

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Common Craft in Newsweek

There a nice little blurb about Common Craft by Nick Summers in the June 1 edition of Newsweek - it's the one with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad on the cover.

It's so exciting to see my hand in mainstream media. :) Read the article here.

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New Video: Preparing an Emergency Kit in Plain English

Today we published a new video called "Preparing an Emergency Kit in Plain English."

This video represents a new kind of relationship for Common Craft. A while back, we were contacted by Public Safety Canada (PSC) about this subject and we saw a couple of opportunities.  First, we could work on a video that has the potential to have a positive impact.  Second, we saw an opportunity for a win-win in terms of the video's ownership - something we call a hybrid relationship.

Emergency kits are a widely accepted part of emergency preparedness and most agree on what a kit should contain.  The opportunity we saw was to work with PSC to create an emergency kit video that would fit their needs and give us an opportunity to offer a similar video for licensing on commoncraft.com. So, PSC received a video built for their Canadian audience and we have a video with versions appropriate for our American audience. We see this as a win-win and enjoyed working with PSC to make it happen. 

This video offers governments and organizations focusing on emergency preparedness a quick and effective way to help citizens get started on building their kits. It can be licensed and branded for use in training and education, or on public facing websites.

Watch the video here.

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Introducing the New CommonCraft.com

A few months back, we made re-thinking our web site a top priority. We needed a better way to organize, display and sell our videos. At the same time, we saw an opportunity for our website to feel like a Common Craft video. Today is the official launch of the new CommonCraft.com and we can barely contain ourselves.

A few things:

1. We need your help. As with anything new, bugs, typos, and issues of all sorts are expected. Please contact us, or leave a comment here if you see anything out of place, or have feedback of any sort.

2. We're using a video player that may require you to upgrade to Flash 10 (the technology that makes sure the videos load fast, etc.). Please let us know your experience with watching the videos.

3. Ten of our videos can now be viewed and purchased with audio in 5 languages, including English. If you're bi-lingual, we would love it if you could watch the videos and let us know what feedback you have.

4. We now offer a newsletter service called "Common Craft Video Updates." If you sign up, we'll send you a short email each time we publish a new video. We don't expect to send more then two per month. You can always sign up at the bottom of every page.

Overall, I hope you'll take a look at the site. It's truly a new way for us to present our work and business - something of which we're very proud (but not too proud to hear feedback!)

We'll talk more about them later, but we worked with two small companies to make it happen. Jay and Anastasia at Juxtaprose helped us re-imagine the site's design and structure while Lyal, Alexa and Vince at Outcome3 turned that design into a incredibly manageable, SEO friendly and purpose-built Drupal site. I can't say enough about the hard work and integrity of these folks - both companies are class-acts.

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Editors in Brief: Common Craft Article in Seattle Magazine

A few months ago, we spent an afternoon with Jamie Friddle, a writer for Seattle Magazine, who was putting together a story on Common Craft. We were so excited. A few weeks later a photographer came to take pictures.

As Sachi will tell you, the process added a layer of anxiety to her day over the next few months. What would the article say? What photos would they use? I'm happy to report that the anxiety was all for naught. The 4 page feature appears in the May 2009 issue of Seattle Magazine and we love it. Jamie's writing captured, in a compelling and interesting way, what we're all about.

Read the article.

 

 

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Chalkboard Animation: FireKites "Autumn Story"

I really love the effect of shadow of the previous image that is left on the chalkboard. I wonder what would happen if we tried this on the whiteboard? I'm sure it wouldn't be nearly as cool.

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.

via: Drawn.ca

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