Design News
Marketers and Designers Should Be Natural Allies
The people in marketing and market research were our natural allies because they appreciated the value of the user’s experience with the product. Also, they had the infrastructure and experience to help us to set up research properly. Sometimes we would ‘piggyback’ human factors research and market research together.
— Interview with Marian Gravel
Ultimately, design is the final word on how well you know your customers. A gifted product is mightier than a gifted pen.
Designing For The Hidden Brain
In offices with an honor system for coffee, people are more likely to pay on days when a photograph of human eyes is discreetly posted above the coffee machine, according to one British study. They’re more prone to cheat if a still life of daisies is pasted there instead – even if they say they’re unaware of either picture.
—The Out–of–Sight Mind
Decision science is finding decision making to be largely unconscious. Influencing those decisions is the central topic of the book The Hidden Brain. Very different from the kind of unconscious interface design most sites are built around.
Starbucks Fails To Understand What Feedback Means
If we delete the customer ideas Starbucks already had in motion, the ideas Starbucks incorrectly takes credit for implementing, and the employee ideas ... then we are left with only SIX ideas implemented. And of these SIX ideas, none can be considered as having significant impact on the Starbucks business.
—Tough Love for Starbucks
Starbucks input to output ratio: 80,000 ideas received and 6 applied over two years. That may not be good, but it is all too typical for the “customer driven.” Comments, feedback, the “conversation” are all meaningless without proof what you’re hearing changes the actions taken. Feedback isn’t feedback without positive action on what’s fed back.
If you’re not getting actionable feedback you’ve designed the feedback mechanism wrong. Based on the article, Starbucks would have done better by suggesting possible new strategically feasible ideas for customers to vote on. Better yet, tie voting into sales.
Supporting Shopping Behavior
Ecommerce sites are set up more like a vending machine than a shopping experience. A Data Explosion Remakes Retailing may be the first real introduction to online merchandising. Pure usability has the user find, get exactly what they came for, no more and no less, then leave. Which is why the more like this design pattern is a much better fit to desirability design.
Social Design Myths
Designing For Social Traction is a nice intro that gets the desirability design right. What Is Social Interaction Design? Explains there’s more to SxD than a single user in isolation, interacting with a computer, running through a task list.
User Experience: 1, UX Gurus: 0
Clarity Trumps Persuasion: How changing the first seven seconds of user experience drove a 201% gain would have been an excellent UX design article. Pity a (direct) marketing firm wrote it. Interesting for the implications for when and where to use captology: Hard to persuade a disoriented user.
By focussing on results, this user experience article rains on the UX parade of untested assumptions.
MyFord Touch vs Dark Cockpit UI Philosophy
While military design is making a fighter as easy to drive as your car, automakers whant to turn your car into a futuristic cockpit. MyFord Touch is just the latest entry in the“ remember when you could just get into a car and drive” category of mystery meat auto interfaces. The pdf report Designing to Control Flight Crew Errors figured out why texting and driving is a bad idea long ago. Too bad your auto designer can’t figure out why the dash in your car shouldn’t text you to distraction either.
Checklists as Information Technology
CIOs inside or outside the medical field should read The Checklist Manifesto, and The Logic and Methodology of Checklists. Checklists are probably the least interesting, most effective tool available for leveraging performance and reducing costs in a range of industries. The design crux is developing a good checklist and changing the culture to provide a positive result.
If only there were a Computer–Aided Checklist for Human Engineering (CACHE)
Dot Production is Data Processing. Connecting Dots is Information Work.
According to recent research from Accenture, nearly half (40 percent) of major corporate decisions are based on the good ’ole gut.
—To Hell with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut
A failure to connect the dots is in the news, once again. And, as always, it is data processing mistaken for information technology at work. Information Technology that doesn’t support analysis or context awareness, it is not information technology. And most programmers and, worse yet CIOs, have zero experience of how to support context using the SDK’s grab bag of generic widgets. Most businesses could use a intellipedia, if more CIOs were chief intelligence officers rather than curators of the data and technology museum.
Customer Innovation Centers. Well, at least they’re trying
The terms “customer driven” and “solutions” seem to be in every manager’s lexicon. But as Professor Gulati notes, “it’s an execution problem.” Companies, he says, “aren’t generally structured to access, absorb or utilize customer insights since they are organized by product, not by customer.”
— Seeing Customers as Partners in InventionMy cell phone died. The company agrees that it's toast and that it’s under warranty, so they will replace it — next Tuesday. The customer service rep cant give me one of the phones right there in the store — he has to special order one. Policy says the reps can’t make warranty exchanges from inventory.
—The cranky user: Policy, scourge of the people
Customer Innovation Centers are the latest in a long list of innovation management initiatives. Putting innovation in a “box” bodes ill. But design will tell if innovation actually gets into the products and services, or whether without culture design these centers are in fact an elaborate customer petting zoo. The design crux: Why are these data collection centers needed when the problem is methodology for translating intangibles into designs that can be executed by a management. Data processing tools applied to an information design problem won’t change results.
Applying the Red Team Review Process to Design
Red teams are a way to test your assumptions, other than testing on customers. A red team review grid, applied to design, could curb a multitude of design problems. (Luckily there are barely dozens to mention these days.)
How Restaurants Drive Sales With (Persuasive) Design
The whole experience is to cram people into a cookie–cutter space, to feed them as many unhealthy calories as possible — then get them to leave,” said Mr. Meyer, the president of the Union Square Hospitality Group and the Yoda of Shake Shack. “That stripping away of human experience? That is where fast food went astray.”
Menu Mind Games exposes the deep level of design thinking involved with persuading you to buy more high profit items in a restaurant. Exactly what most calling themselves designers have no intention of ever learning about: Why We Buy.
Social Design for Social Networks
Many of the people who write about avatars actually mean characters, but they don't understand there's a difference. Avatars are dolls, characters are simulacra.
Neither avatars nor characters, though, are people. Neither are anything to do with what makes online worlds so completely absorbing. There's a level of immersion beyond that of the character: the persona.
—Avatar, Character, Persona. Immerse yourself…
We’re still on the tin cans and string level of network interaction design. Networks are complicated, not sophisticated. Which is why articles like Performing Identity on Facebook should be refreshing for real designers, interested in social interaction design. Human–computer–human interaction design goes beyond HCI.
Why Most Companies Can’t Handle Good Design
In a down economy, AT&T’s war on the people sending them their money is proof positive most companies can’t handle a good design. Who knew making things more usable would result in more use?
We Need A Theodore Levitt For Our Field, To Take On Design Myopia
Design Myopia: Short sighted and inward looking approach to design focusing on the firm instead of designing the firm and its products in terms of the customers’ needs and wants. Such self–centered firms define design too narrowly and superficially, failing to use design strategy as business driver. Consequently such firms falter in the marketplace and fail to comprehend the competitive advantages of design driven competitors.
Designer Myopia: Confusion of design with artististic self expression. “In addition to a misguided approach to and misapprehensions about the definition and role of design, there are fundamental problems with the design community’s core ideals. Unfortunate distractions in the graphic design culture have led to the cultivation of a measure of contempt and slight regard from the rest of the world – especially the business world.”
Information Design Mistakes: Charts
Everyone goes on and on about typos. Information work mistakes which may cost millions of dollars or kill people …not so much. So this handy guide to chart selection is useful.
Company Meets Customer
Innovation Starts with Empathy is really about knowing your customer, not a market data set.
Managing as Designing: Business Origami and Service Design
Business origami, or paper prototyping service design is an interesting concept for design driven companies to puruse. It’s the difference between putting a designer at the table with business, or shuffling them off to the kiddie table to doodle.
What Britney Spears Can Teach UX Designers
The recent installment of the lip–sync saga contains a lesson for user experience design. I was wondering where the hidden story was, and I figure it is not about lip–synced performances. It’s about inauthentic performance, beating your audience over the head with the fact you’re just going through the motions. The alternative explanation (of poor UX design) fits the facts and comments much better. With fashion models pretending to be employees and customers, staring vacantly from page after page, most web site designs would make a lip syncer blush.
The takeaway is user experience hinges upon authenticity. In other words don’t spend forty million on “branding” and man your cash registers with bored, minimum wage flunkies robotically lip–syncing “Have a nice day.” Because your performance is your brand, and style won’t replace substance.
Of course, this is really a stretch to compare with web design, which actually fits much better with the Milli Vanilli scandal, which is just separating style from content. Separation to such an extent that a schism occurs.
Viral Marketing Update: Microsoft takes the wrong lesson from the Britney Spears incident, going viral in the worst way possible
New Design–Your–Own Coke Vending Machine Sends Data Back To Headquarters
Extremely interesting is Coca–Cola’s 100–Flavor Interactive Freestyle Soda Fountain. Although I can see a host of ways this can go wrong, the interaction design potential is intriguing. Coke is clearly looking to learn whether consumers as designers will come with the next big thing.
Competitive Camouflage Done The Right Way
Rather than blend into the background noise of monkey–see monkey–do imitation, The Man Who Hides Cars is about preventing imitation through design. Web design could learn a lot about preventing knockoffs through design, but not in the current primitive state of confusing technical complexity with design sophistication.
Nearly Context Aware Username & Password Entry Form
Chroma–Hash is very close to being another promising context aware widget. The demo page shows how it uses color feedback to help users. Better: Indication of a strong or weak password, and whether the username is taken by someone else.
Context Aware Ratings Widgets
Brewing a Better Rating System provides the kind of context aware widget required for a genuine information technology designed to assist users. Design Crux: Avoiding the Amazon Five–Star Milk Effect.
Cell Phones Provide The Bridge Between Bits and Atoms
Another intriguing look at what the cell phone will become is Xsights, which promises to augment physical objects with online media through taking a picture with an iPhone. For example, taking a picture of a movie poster to play the movie trailer. Such applications should make web–only designers aware of the merging of offline and online, bits and atoms.
Using a Wall of Wonder
User stories have three critical aspects. We can call these Card, Conversation, and Confirmation.
—Essential XP: Card, Conversation, Confirmation
Exploring business requirements with a Wall of Wonder gives a good overview of this collaboration technique. Card Confirmation Confirmation fits nicely into the Wall of Wonder technique.
Return on Design
for every dollar invested in advertising, packaging and promotion, and visual communication at the point of sale, companies realized a $7.21 ROI. But when the advertising didn't change (or there was no advertising)—and packaging design was the only thing that did change—there was a $15.17 average ROI on every dollar invested.
— Design: Proving the Value of Design
The Tropicana packaging fiasco dropped sales 20% for something as simple as a packaging change. Professional, clean and practically Web 2.0, the return on design was negative. It’s not just shelf appeal, either as this fulfillment example shows, packaging design extends to post purchase reassurance reducing return rates.
SEObsessive–Compulsives: It’s Like Google Bought Tourette’s Syndrome
Most designers can appreciate good search engine optimization. SEO long ago crossed the line of search engine ranking to SE rigging. Luckily search engine position as part of marketing (SEM) is making inroads, where someone (somewhere) takes a minute or two designing a site worth getting a good rank. Because good content generates traffic and one–way inbound links, without a paid SEO. Good page rank to a bad site design puts the SEO’s kids through college.
With search engine marketing in mind, keep the SEO–Compulsives destroying word of mouth and conversions with poorly designed web content on a short leash.
Stopping the Innovation Hemorrhage
An article on innovation talks about the question CEOs ask, “How can I make my company more innovative?” Wrong question. Employees and companies are already innovative. They find loopholes in a stifling wall of beaureaucratic roadblocks in order to do their job every day. The question is how to stop the hemorrhage of innovation by redeploying working within the system so your employees work on the system. The article Change By Design explains how even hospitals can apply design thinking to innovate.
More on Writing As Design
Writing as Design, Design as Writing is an interesting take on creating an experience through writing. J. Peterman is an example of writing which creates a user experience (that people actually desire).
Psychographics and Persona Design
Archetypes, psychographics and self–story – three geeky words to know in a post modern world is the crux between marketing and the interaction designer’s persona design. And, while most graphic designers don’t understand branding the article is a good foundation on how brands are designed …or run into a ditch.
Turning Fuel Efficient Driving Into a Game
Ford Fusion’s New Dashboard Helps Drivers Become More Fuel Efficient scoring your current driving habits, using a fuel score as incentive towards green behavior change: Persuasive design style. The Virtual Dash Tree concept is part of serious game design.
User Research: Saying I Am Not The User Like You Mean It
User research starts by saying in a loud clear voice, “I am not a typical user.” Eating your own dogfood is okay … when you’re selling product which is only fit for dogs.
Laddering is a user interview technique designed to get beneath dog food issues and into what customers desire enough to buy.
Designing for Repeat Customers
The hardest sale at least profit is the first sale to a new customer. This, along with people who will never do business with you, are the target users of too many web designers. Web designers should have some idea of how to target best customers and grow lifetime customer value like Zappos.
Using Comics to Storyboard the User Experience
Comics: Not just for laughs! offers some unique opportunities for UX designers to offer something more than warmed over usability leftovers. Currently, usability as UX deals with exactly one user emotion.