wikicity project

MIT is doing some really cool research on how to use mobile technology to map the flow of people in cities. Each blue dot on the picture above represents a mobile phone, which can be tracked in real time. One really interesting application could be public transport planning. If you know where people are, and if you can spot ‘migration’ patterns, it would certainly help increase transport efficiency.

check this project out here

Product servitisation: the new frontier

I was going through my old notebook and came across some notes about an interview Sam Lucent (HP’s design chief) gave to Business Week. This interview was published a while ago (November 2005), but the concept is quite contemporary:

As products become much more complex, it’s not about designing the individual product, it’s about orchestrating this complex ecosystem to create a wonderful customer experience. So my job touches on all aspects — all the tangible, visual, real-world aspects of that experience. If you just think of a customer journey, it’s everything from collateral and point-of-sale to packaging to the industrial design, the user interface, and the area where interface and the software and the hardware come together, which we call product interaction. So it’s orchestrating all of those touch points

Sam Lucent had the foresight to understand that in order to achieve competitive advantage, companies need to engage customers in an emotional level by providing delightful experiences. By servitising their products, companies can not only create strategies that are difficult to copy, but also open new market opportunities. In most industrialised countries, the service sector accounts for approximately 70% of the GDP, offering a great potential for product-based companies to expand.

Nike+ is another great example. They’ve managed to migrate from this ‘company/product centric’ campaign - Just do it, to a networked and co-created way of evolving the brand. I just love seeing all these paradigms being broken! Welcome to the service economy!

Using your iPhone as a boarding pass

I saw this interesting post on Gerald Buckely’s blog: he tried to use his iPhone as an e-boarding pass on a flight from San Antonio to Dallas. And it worked!

”I asked the gate agent if he thought the PDF of my boarding pass would scan. He said, “I don’t know. Let’s try it.”

And, it worked great!

I asked him if AA had tried rolling anything like that out yet. He said not to his knowledge. He was impressed in the quality of the resolution of the barcode. Then a couple of other guys huddled around and got to thinking their Blackberry’s could display PDFs too…”

This is what I call co-creation! Innovation is all about spotting latent needs from consumers. This is clearly one of them!

via gwhiz

Talking the talk

I really like the way Virgin communicates to customers. They always use plain English, and most importantly, they make every contact feel as a bit of fun. I was having a problem with my internet modem, and received a new one by post. The letter that came with the new modem said:

“We’re are sorry you had problems with you modem; this little box of goodies will help!
… All you need to to now is follow the instruction below…
Ok, here it goes:
…Replace you new modem, using the spanner. It’s there to help unscrew and screw the white cable without too much elbow grease!

Virgin also has a great attention for details. When my broadband pack first arrived, I got this massive box containing all the equipment I needed. To be honest, opening the box and setting my new broadband up was quite exciting (I have to confess, I was feeling like a kid opening a Christmas gift). And then I noticed the ‘caution’ label on the box, which added a bit of fun to whole experience.

Sometimes, small details make a big difference. Next time you have to design something, or get in touch with a customer, try to make it a bit fun. It won’t add anything to your costs, and it surely will have a great impact on your customer’s experience.

NTT DoCoMo Vision 2010 - the art of storytelling

I first saw this video from NTT DoCoMO a couple of years ago, and although the prospect of having this kind of technology around us soon us quite exciting, what really strikes me is how powerful those videos are to tell a a story.

Good storytelling is not only about communicating a vision or a concept. It’s about establishing an emotional connection with your audience.

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

The art of bending time (and it’s impact on customers’ perceptions)

In his book ‘Why we buy - the science of shopping‘ Paco Underhill describes a few techniques to ‘bend time’, and change the customers’ perceptions of a particular service encounter.

Bad times are whenever the customer is made to wait. Most people agree that one of the key factors for determining the quality of a service experience is the waiting time. The shorter, the better.

The interesting thing is: the way you perceive time though your ‘internal clock’ may differ from real time. When people have to queue up for up to a minute and a half, their sense of how much time has elapsed is fairly accurate. If waiting time is a bit longer than that, they may feel that the actual waiting time is much longer.

Underhill outlines a few tricks to bend the perceived time:

Lots of interactions:
the time a customer spends after an employee has initiated contact seems to go faster than time spent before the interaction. Having someone simply acknowledging that the customer is waiting, and offering a plausible explanation, automatically makes the waiting feel shorter.

Orderliness:
People like to wait in a orderly manner (specially the British!). If customers see that they will be helped soon (e.g. a system that says that waiting time is about 3 min, or a orderly queue), they will relax, and the time spent waiting seems shorter

Diversions:
Entertaining customers while waiting always makes that ‘dead time’ less painful. People waiting for at a hairdressers for example, always seem to be not so bothered, as they flick through magazines. Or in restaurants, when they offer you a drink or some nibbles while you wait to get seated.

‘Subject to change’ podcast

Derrick Story interviewed the authors of ‘Subject to change’, recently published by the Adptative Path crew. If you don’t have time to read the book, you can get a sneak preview by listing to the interview’s podcast.

The book talks about how products and services need to be designed through empathic understanding of the user, and how thriving products and services are not stand alone propositions. Successful products and services are build around supportive ecosystems that provide the right environment, staff behaviour, tone of voice, etc.

via Adpative Path

Bill Moggridge’s keynote presentation

Bill Moggridge delivered a really cool talk during the Service Design Symposium, hosted by the CIID. It’s really interesting the way he explains how design has evolved over time. Just after graduation, back in the 60’s, he thought he would spend his whole life designing kettles and washing machines.

But as technology evolved, and life became more complex, he realised that designers needed to design the systems that actually surround a product. For example, how to make a train journey more delightful? Designers need to not only worry about making a comfy seat, they actually need to think about the whole customer journey, and how systems, processes, people impact a customer’s experience. Welcome to the amazing world of service design!

via CIID

from ciid.dk posted with vodpod

IDEO eyes open

The folks at IDEO launched a the IDEO eyes open, a website to enable ’social network’ of stories about great experiences:

Ideoeyesopen.com is about casting a wide net to find inspirational experiences in the unlikeliest of places—the things we do and see everyday.

Michele Dougherty published a really interesting post about the airport experience. Working for a company that specialises in producing film titles, she drew an interesting parallel between the airport experience and the process of creating a film title sequence:

“When Fred asked me to think about a place or experience that embodied some of the key elements involved in creating film titles, a few places sprung to mind. But none seemed quite as compelling as the airport.

The three main things I focus on when I start a project are: choreography, typography, and telling a good story (which is largely dependent on the previous two things in my line of work). Upon thinking about this assignment, I realized that the airport is chock full of all three. Not to mention, it’s an intriguing place to observe how they all come together in a highly staged narrative experience with literal steps that must be taken—which is remarkably relevant to the kind of timing and delivery moments that are so critical to the kind of work we do.”

I particularly liked the idea of choreography and typography when creating, or innovating customers’ experiences. At the end of the day, it’s all about staging a story.

A day in the life, user research and digital nomads

The latest edition of the Economist published a special report on digital nomads, or “how wireless communications is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places”. I’m still digesting this report, and will post a comment on this shortly.

The report included a series of contributions from ethnographers and all sorts of user-centred researchers, including Jan Chipchase, who made an interesting video of a day in his life, and how it was affected by technology. This is really useful tool to uncover latent needs and understand people’s motivations when relating to services, products and the society. At Engine, we are using video more and more, as this proved to be a very rich media to support our research.

A model for innovation

Dubberly Design Office developed a a really cool tool to model and map innovation:

“The model is built on the idea that innovation is about changing paradigms. The model situates innovation between two conversations. Innovation transforms old into new. It is a process in which insight inspires change and creates value.”

You can download the full size model (PDF format) from here

via uiGarden

The art of reinventing yourself

There is a great buzz in the blogsphere about how Starbucks lost it’s ‘cool’. Personally, I think it’s not my coffee shop of choice. There is a Starbucks about 5 min from where I live, which I’ve never visit. I prefer to go to a small, friendly and cosy local café just on the opposite side of the road. Why? Funny enough, because I can get the experience that Starbucks used (and promised) to offer on the early days.

Starbucks need to reinvent themselves. They’ve just launched My Starbucks Idea, a social forum to enable them to listen to the customers’ voice, get some really good customer-driven insight and co-create a new service. Why bother with CSI, KPIs and all of that? Great idea!

via

The perception is actually the reality

Chase and Dasu conducted a research on how to create better experiences by applying behavioural science. For decades, cognitive and behavioural scientists have studied the way people behave in social interactions, and their findings are extremely helpful for experiential design. One of the key aspects of behavioural science is that in any interaction between a service or product and a client, the perception is actually the reality. In other words, what really matters is how the customer interprets the interaction.

According to behavioural scientists, people are not able to remember the whole set of events when they recall an experience. Only a few significant moments stick to people’s mind. In other words, they remember snapshots, not movies. When assessing past experiences people usually prefer a sequence that improves over time. For example, gamblers prefer to lose £10 first, then win £5, rather than win £5 then lose £10. The ending of a sequence of events is also crucial for the overall recollection of the experience. A great ending will usually recur in good memories.

According to Chase and Dasu, there are five principles that when applied may contribute to improve the perceptions customers have of a service experience:

1. Finish strong:
the end of a transaction or the last stage of an experience is the moment that remains in the customers’ reminiscences. For example, composers such as Beethoven always finish the symphonies in exhilarating movements. In the airline industry context, having someone to help in the luggage reclaim area would considerably improve the passenger’s perception of his or her trip.

2. Get bad experiences out early
people are happier if a sequence of events evolves from bad to good. Waiting in the check in queue is always unpleasant. But if the airline company offers a reward such as a cup of coffee or even apologies for making a passenger wait, it can turn a bad experience into an acceptable one.

3. Segment pleasure, combine pain
people prefer to win small amounts several times instead of a greater amount once. They also prefer to loose a larger amount once rather than smaller amounts several times. Companies should break pleasant experiences into multiple stages, and combine unpleasant ones into a single stage. For example, passengers always have to go through several steps when calling a help-line. Cutting the number of steps would reduce the perceived time.

4. build commitment through choice
people are happier when they have more control over the process. Having the opportunity to make some choices, such as choosing a meal between two options, and being served whenever they want would greatly enhance the perceived quality of the service.

5. give people rituals
people usually are more comfortable when dealing with familiar rituals and activities. These rituals provide a standard, and customers base their evaluations on these standards. For example, passengers expect to find the same level of comfort in every aircraft of an airline. Sometimes older aircrafts are not so well equipped as newer ones, making passengers feel the flight unpleasant.

I guess that’s why people usually say: “save the best for last”…