Nokia recently ran a project where they went to Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and Accra and set up studio spaces and asked people to draw their ideal mobile phone.
Is this all part of Nokia’s user-generated innovation program where they seek input from users about what they should put in their product roadmaps.
My personal favourites are Sam, an artist from Accra and Roberto from Rio.
Check out some of the designs here
Posted on May 14th, 2008 by Sara
Filed under: Design | No Comments »
I may be last to the party, but I have just recently discovered Facebook’s “ You may know these people” widget at the bottom right of your personal homepage.
This list is obviously generated by comparing your friend list with those of your friends to see if you’re missing anyone who is linked to 1 or more of your friends.
It’s like like your own personal long-tail. You’re being presented with those people who are completely on the periphery, periphery of your life- they are out of site and out of mind. The people you haven’t thought of in years are being surfaced to you in an Amazon-esque fashion. Instead of “we recommend this product because people who shop like you have also bought it” you’re getting, “ we recommend this person to you because your friends- x,y,z- like them”
I am personally loving it as having lived on three continents in the past 10 years my memory gets fuzzy when I try to remember the names of all the people I have met and the friends who have come in and out of my life. So when I see their little faces popping up in the widget, I get pretty excited to send them a note to see how they are doing.
It also demonstrates how small the world really is when you can see how interconnected we really are. This becomes obvious when “a recommend friend” comes up and this person is connected to a person you went to elementary school with, another who you worked with right out of university and a third who you met backpacking in Europe- how do they know all the same people?!? You really begin to wonder if someone is living a parallel life to yourself.
Posted on April 18th, 2008 by Sara
Filed under: Thoughts | 1 Comment »
Yes, a recent business week article is reminding us how important it is to give your customer an experience that will give you their ongoing loyalty.
Key takeaways:
Posted on April 12th, 2008 by Sara
Filed under: Customer Experience | No Comments »
In the similar fashion of Dell’s Ideastorm, yet with a softer and what I think it is a more accessible design for non techy people is— My Starbucks idea.
The concept was paned at their annual meeting, but it appears that the new site has received thousands of comments/ votes since launching.
The number of comments and the success of this is probably due to Starbucks huge market share and the fact that the site is one big suggestion box where anything seems to go. But, it seems to be acheiveing its goals of getting traffic, giving customers an open platform and getting “ideas”.
However, the true success of this concept will come if Starbucks is able show that they are listening. To do this they need to implement the suggestions and then feedback back what they’ve done to the MyStarbucksIdea.com audience.
Posted on April 9th, 2008 by Sara
Filed under: Customer Experience | 1 Comment »
I have been doing some research on the psychology of free and came across an interesting Tech Dirt article from last year.
What really stood out was the step after defining your market- ultimately you want to grow your market share, so you should define what you can give away for free at no real cost to your business. To do this you need to define your infinite and your scarce components.
Your infinite components are things that you have in infinite quantities and you could give away for free and your scarce components are things, which are tied to your “free” infinite components, but you would charge for.
So for an online application- you may give away usage of the application because you are only developing one version and you can support an infinite number of users at no extra cost, but you may charge for additional storage, customer care, value-add features— anything that will enhance the experience of using the product.
Posted on April 1st, 2008 by Sara
Filed under: Economics | No Comments »
I just read an interesting email newsletter from Forrester Research about the evolution of marketing. Historically, marketing was a one way street where companies pushed everything to consumers; this was done on and offline. Now as the online experience evolves consumers and marketers begin to develope “relationships”. These relationships grow as consumers actively engage with a companies brand .
As I can’t provide a link to the newsletter—here is a cut and paste of the content:
Direct marketers and market researchers unearth deep client needs. Leading direct marketers already combine Web clicks with purchase and loyalty data to unearth a consumer’s interaction with the brand. But BrandIntel went a step further and recorded the content that users generated and other consumers read. It could then analyze what its customers really wanted and why one production flopped — Snakes on a Plane — and another succeeded — Heroes. Direct marketers will also use this data to find brand ambassadors and pamper them.
eCommerce professionals drive online sales with personalization. More than a third of Web visitors will make a purchase after seeing a personalized recommendation. eCommerce professionals can boost online sales with one-to-one personalization, such as individual homepages at Amazon.com, or one-to-many personalization, such as Virgin’s mobile offers based on someone’s home address. These firms base personalization on engagement — how the consumer behaves on their site.
Customer experience professionals innovate the brand. Whirlpool observed people at home and used the results to develop a new sub-brand — Gladiator — with fridges for men in their garages. To meet these uncovered needs, customer experience professionals will develop a disruptive strategy, simplifying the interaction, amplifying the service elements, and repositioning the brand overall.
Interactive marketers drive a better online experience. With 80% of consumers visiting manufacturers’ sites to learn about products and services, a firm’s online presence is the ideal starting point for repositioning. Firms can improve their online engagement with their customers, inviting them to offer input for brand values and product strategies in an online community, as Lego and Dell have done.
Marketing leaders steer based on hard data. Measuring engagement will take the guesswork out of budget allocation. Engagement can drive awareness, transactions, brand preference, and loyalty. But each of these objectives requires a different approach and investment in people, processes, and technology. Marketing leaders from firms like CompUSA and BMW prioritized one goal, chose a very specific set of tools and vendors, and successfully moved the needle on transactions and loyalty, respectively.
Posted on March 26th, 2008 by Sara
Filed under: Customer Experience, Marketing | 3 Comments »
Everyone in business is a designer. The role of a designer is to solve problems, whether you’re designing a poster, a website, or a product- all of these things have been created because there was a need for them. The poster was needed to sell a dvd, the website to sell books and the product because we needed a chair to sit on.
Before each item was designed, the designer would have been presented with the problem- I need to sell my dvd. Sometimes the solution phase is quick and easy and other times it’s more a iterative process and research is conducted to fully understand the requirements. Every situation is different, but the design/problem solving processes are always there.
Problem solving is done by all areas of business- customer care, accounting, marketing and sales. People in these roles need to be innovative and produce deliverables that give their company a competitive advantage and I am not sure these individuals consider themselves designers. I think they should and I think introducing an innovation culture and design principles into an organisation can help staff approach their day to day problems like designers typically do.
Today I came across a new MBA in Design Strategy from California College of the Arts. Hot! Now this looks interesting. The idea is to train leaders who can help integrate design processes and creative thinking into businesses. The program only takes 30 students a year and the two year tuition looks like it’ll be well over $60,000K; not cheap. Take a look at the syllabus:First Year
Second Year
So for those of us who can not afford $60k + living costs + loss of income- we have got to take into our own hands. Upskill ourselves and look for careers in organisations that are design lead. Those jobs are out there, I have had the opportunity to work for some and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Posted on March 19th, 2008 by Sara
Filed under: Design | 1 Comment »
A friend of mine has become slightly obsessed with (and an author within) the Urban Dictionary. I think her love of the English language brought the concept of this evolving dictionary to her consciousness, but the ability to create words and phrases based on modern life is quite powerful and in most cases a good laugh.
What I find most intriguing is not the creation of the words today, but how historians will look back at them to analyse and understand the people of this era. For example, today’s word of the day is Jingle Mail. Definition:
Jingle mail is the package containing the keys to your house that you send back to the bank when the interest rate on your adjustable-rate or IO/neg-am mortgage resets, or the property tax bill gets reassessed at double what it was two years ago, or you find out that heating and AC and repairs cost a ton of freaking money, or you lose your job because of the recession that’s coming with the housing crash, and you can’t make the payments any more.
“My neighbor put up the Escalade and the Beemer that he bought with his third HELOC for sale, and has been having garage sales every week for the last month to raise cash … I give it about 90 days till he sends in the jingle mail.”
Can you see what the Urban Dictionary will tell us? In 150, historians will look back to March 18th, 2008 and see that the word of the day was Jingle Mail. Why is this word relevant and humorus today? Hmm… let’s see the world is skating on thin ice awaiting the true impact of the subprime mortgage crisis, yesterday, one of America’s largest investment banks was sold for a 17th of its value, oil is at a record high per barrell and people are scared of a recession and a depression.
What’s the impact of all of this on culture? Let’s check out the urban dictionary and see what are people saying? How is their language evolving to cope with what’s going on?
I can almost see the thesis abstract on the sub-prime mortgages crisis, there will be a foot note reference to the urban dictionary showing how the economic waves rippled down into culture by the formation of new words.
Posted on March 18th, 2008 by Sara
Filed under: Thoughts | No Comments »
Awhile ago I read an interesting article with Scott Griffith , CEO of Zipcar.com in an Adaptive Path newsletter.
The most interesting part was about Zipcars’ approach to user experience being ingrained in the brand ideals of the organisation. These ideals start at the website and then they are interwoven into the lifetime experience of the customer.
Question: In terms of the design of that service — you’ve got a lot of components — a web site, mobile (I don’t know if it’s SMS), you’ve got the cars themselves, and a call center. How explicit is the design of the service? How planned is it? What does Zipcar’s blueprint look like? Is it really refined and detailed, or is it a bit more organic?
Answer: Well, we have one. We have a culture that we’ve tried to develop that, we hope, matches the brand that we deliver; and that’s all around self-service. The design is meant to be simple in nature, elegant, and self-service focused. It starts in the company’s culture and in the DNA of our brand. We’re very serious about keeping all of our user systems very simple, but we have a group internally that we call our product group.
They focus on the lifetime experience that a member has with our service, from the first time they go to our web site through the last time they ever use one of our cars and decide not to be a member any more. They map that cycle and follow it; we’re constantly trying to refine and improve that map, that architecture. That timeline, by the way, lasts for typically four or five years, our members stay with us for multiple years.
We think about that whole experience as they use the cars for the first time or review their online billing for the first time. They might have a problem on the side of the road, to refuel the car, get into an accident; these are all experiences that we have to deal with, because we’re treating these cars very much like car ownership, but you’re just buying it one hour at a time.”
I love the idea that to truly deliver an extraordinary customer experience, it needs to start with a careful definition of what that is; then ingrain the solution into the companies brand and culture. Give the customer a full experience that starts with marketing/sales material and then seamlessly embed it into every interaction that the customer has with the company over time.
Posted on March 17th, 2008 by Sara
Filed under: Customer Experience | 5 Comments »
Every second year in Wellington, an Arts Festival of great magnitude is unleashed. It’s quite a spectacular event as acts from all over the world in Theater, Dance, Music, Art and Literature are asked to come and perform/speak in New Zealand. As NZ’s remote location makes it expensive to travel to and from, this festival is a great opportunity to see what’s hot in the performing arts arena in the rest of the world.
As part of the Readers/Writers’ week- the festival brought over Joesph Stiglitz to speak. Dr. Stiglitz is a very big brain. He’s a 2001 noble prize winner, former head of The World Bank, former Chairman on Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and current professor at Columbia University and an accomplished author.
I wasn’t a fan of the format of the talk because he was being interviewed by a journalist who was unable to offer pure Q&A without giving his own journalistic spin/opinion on each topic. However, I did enjoy the content.
A couple things that stuck out from this talk were:
I am not sure if a copy of this presentation will be online, but I’ll post it if I find it. In the meantime, if you are interested in hearing more from Dr. Stiglitz- here’s a link to an interview he did with Carnegie Council.
Posted on March 15th, 2008 by Sara
Filed under: Economics | No Comments »