Voice of the Customer does not necessarily equal Innovation

The tools for understanding customer needs and driving product or service business requirements are diverse and there is no one-size-fits-all tool that will work in every development instance. The article in Innovation Management by Tony Ulwick discusses where Voice of the Customer (VOC) is not an appropriate tool for innovation.

Innovation is successful when it targets customers’ needs, and yet nearly 90% of those polled in a recent IIR webinar survey reported that they had never worked on a new product in their entire career in which all the customer’s needs were known. Experts in the voice-of-the-customer (VOC) innovation technique shrug their shoulders when confronted with such facts. They say that customers do not know all their needs; customers have latent needs and needs they cannot articulate; their needs change quickly over time. We beg to differ. It is possible to know all the needs of a given customer group—it’s just that VOC has a misconception about needs, and, more fundamentally, it’s the wrong tool for the job.

The whole article is here.

The Fun Theory

This is several years old now, but still excellent examples of how to design an experience to harness and enhance an existing human behavior. I love that most of these examples incorporate sound as part of the experience.

See all the examples here.

Dear Airlines, Please Don't Piss Off Famous People With Blogs

Moby, from what I've heard, is one of more pleasant musicians touring these days. And this post on his blog about his experience with Air Portugal is nicely worded and could have been more pointed. But his worldwide audience of many, many fans can probably read between the lines:

so, they lied. but why? just for fun? just to torture tired travelling musicians? just to make annoying travel even more annoying?
did they get a memo from the devil that morning:
'whenever possible try to make air travel, which is already annoying, even more annoying.
sincerely,
the devil'

Read the whole post here.

Ericsson and Dave and his machines

A nice critique by Sherry Turkle of a new Ericsson ad (presumedly a series) portraying life with social media and machines that are aware. Hard to know what the brand is saying at this point, but the first installment is definitely pointing toward the dark side.

Some of you are going to look at this video — the story of a young guy named Dave (that's Dave in the picture just above) who's on his way home to an apartment where his stove, lights, vacuum cleaner, microwave and fireplace are feverishly anticipating his return, and you're going to say, "Ahhhhh, let me be Dave. If only I could have a place wired like his."

Others of you are going to want to take a sledgehammer to every lamp, toaster, vacuum cleaner and microchip in the place — and perhaps to Dave.

I don't know which side of the Dream Technology Divide you are on, but trust me, this is a polarizing video.

See the ad and read the critique here.

UK Rail tickets fail basic usability

Great article on how UK Rail tickets are designed for ticket takers, not train riders.

I overheard a familiar conversation on the train to London the other day. The ticket inspector was explaining to a passenger that their ticket was no good, the conversation went something like this.

Inspector: Tickets please Passenger: Here you go Inspector: I need both parts please Passenger: …. I only bought a single Inspector: Your ticket comes with a reservation. If you don’t have the reservation part you’ll need to buy a new ticket. Passenger: (Cue panicked fumbling through bags)… Oh here you go. Inspector: …Ahh see you’re on the wrong train. This ticket has booked you on the 7.45.

The passenger had to buy another ticket, or risk a penalty fare.

This got me thinking (As I looked down to check my own ticket). No wonder they didn’t know what train they were allowed to catch. These tickets make no sense. They are designed for ticket inspectors. Not for travellers.

You can read the entire article here.

Frank Gehry and Principles of Design

A great article by Christian Saylor in UX Magazine on design principles that inform the work of Frank Gehry, but also apply to any design effort.

Time and time again we see Frank Gehry, with great intention and thoughtful discipline, building great experiences around the needs of people. He never once started a project with the end goal of pleasing his client; rather, he approaches each engagement with a continuous devotion to the end user.

So if we take the Three Principles of Being Frank:

• purpose before presentation
• explore and iterate
• shape and movement

we begin to see some very foundational UX practices.

Full article here: http://uxmag.com/design/lets-be-frank

Clifford Geertz and the "thick description"

Another nice article by Jon Freach at Frog Design in the Atlantic:

http://m.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/07/what-designers-can-learn-from-a-pioneering-anthropologist/241333/

Sometime in the mid-90s, when I was learning how to use research in the design process, a mentor of mine, Rick Robinson, would hold book reviews on Fridays at e-Lab, one of the first ethnographic research consultancies that helped design firms, advertising agencies, and corporations understand their users and customers. During one of those late afternoon sessions, he introduced Clifford Geertz's book The Interpretation of Cultures and spoke about the role and importance that a "thick description" plays when describing our experiences in the field.

The Art of Design Research (and Why It Matters)

Measuring behavior and understanding the reasons for that behavior are key requirements for any design pursuit, whether that is designing a new product, or creating the marketing for that new product. This article in The Atlantic gives four benefits for design research:

Recently, my colleague Ben McAllister contributed a piece to this section called "The 'Science' of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea." In it he cautioned against a simplistic view of research as it applies to the design process because it's often synonymous with science—a discipline known for providing "hard truths" about the world. This leads people to believe (sometimes falsely) that "the research" will do the same for business. I am a researcher and a designer, and his article does raise a worthwhile question: "What is research good for, and how can we use it for the purpose of design?"

Designers thrive when they have a working concept of what makes people tick, a context that allows them to shape their ideas by considering what people covet and use, and somewhere to focus all their creative energy. Research can provide the fuel for new ideas. To Ben's point, design research isn't a scientific endeavor aimed at finding truths. Our clients typically can't afford the large sample sets and extended time frames necessary for such a "scientific" process.

And sometimes design teams don't have the patience to see the value in dragging out a study in an effort to make it scientifically or statistically significant. We're just not wired that way; we prefer to make and experiment and then analyze later. So what is research good for?

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/05/the-art-of-design-research-and-why-it-matters/239561/

Videotaping the DEMCMCAH

Families, like organisms, adapt over time to the environment they exist within. My Grandparents' family behaved in very different ways to how my family behaved when I was growing up, and my own family has also evolved in how it behaves and operates. While this seems like a "so what" observation, there is not much research out there that confirms or disproves that idea. So this article in the NY Times seems timely.

At a conference here this month, more than 70 social scientists gathered to bring to a close one of the most unusual, and oddly voyeuristic, anthropological studies ever conceived. From 2002 to 2005, before reality TV ruled the earth, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, laboriously recruited 32 local families, videotaping nearly every waking, at-home moment during a week — including the Jacket Standoff.

Filmmakers have turned a lens on the minutiae of unscripted domestic life before, perhaps most famously in “The Osbournes” on MTV and the 1970s PBS program “An American Family.”

But the U.C.L.A. project was an attempt to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat.

“This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world,” said Thomas S. Weisner, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A. who was not involved in the research. “What it does is hold up a mirror to people. They laugh. They cringe. It shows us life as it is actually lived.”

How to put your brand into the garbage in one easy step

When companies mess up, social media can amplify that mess by orders of magnitude.

Maintaining brand standards all the way to the literal curb is probably one of the hardest things to accomplish. The best planning and execution deteriorates quickly on the ground when once invisible mistakes get broadcast through the web.