As products become services, and services become more thoughtfully and holistically designed, we are breaking out of our digital silos and endeavoring to support a more seamless cross-channel customer experience spanning every touchpoint between the customer and company. But what constitutes the channel in cross-channel? And what implication does this have on the customers' experience when interacting with your product or service?
Last week saw the latest release of Instapaper, a service for saving web pages for reading later. It seems like a simple thing, but Instapaper has embedded itself into my life surprisingly deeply, and is a must-have for folks who find themselves with dozens of tabs in their browser of articles they want to read, but don't quite have the time for right now. Instapaper also proves quite instructive of how to deliver great experiences.
As a User Experience practitioner, you learn about UX in school (even if it wasn't called UX), you improve your skills in practice by being part of project teams, and you update your knowledge at a UX conference or training. But what about the people around you? Where do Project Managers, Product Managers, Developers, Sales, QA, Strategists, and Managers learn about User Experience?
As Jesse tweeted earlier today from the awards ceremony held at MIT, he and we are excited, pleased, and humbled that Adaptive Path is one of the winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge for our iWitness project.
With funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the iWitness project will bridge the gap between traditional and citizen media by creating a web-based tool that aggregates user-generated content from social media during big news events. Whether a parade or protest, election or earthquake, iWitness will display photos, videos and messages in an easy-to-browse interface. iWitness will make it easier to cross-reference first-person accounts with journalistic reporting, opening up new avenues for storytelling, fact-checking and connecting people to events in their communities.
Can I have a single messaging platform yet? I just performed an accounting of the various ways I send messages to friends, family, and coworkers:
Last weekend, the New York Times published a lengthy piece on Sony and its woes. Sony is emblematic of a company that thrived in an Industrial Age mindset and is having trouble figuring its path in a Connected Age. While the article uses the recent earthquake/tsunami as a hook to talk about Sony's troubles, it acknowledges that Sony's had serious challenges long before Mother Nature exacted her toll. This ten year stock chart shows that Sony has never really recovered from the 2001 recession, and that the 2008/9 recession really hammered it.
Whether or not Microsoft paid too much, I have little doubt that Skype is an extremely valuable property (and I don't say this just because they're a client.) I've seen Skype embed itself into my life unlike other services. At home, it's for video calls with my children's grandparents. At work, it's for lightweight video conferencing between our offices, and with our clients. So while Skype began as a voice calling service (and I'm sure that's how it's still primarily used), it's unique utility really became clear with how it handles video calling, and, as bandwidth continues to improve, I suspect this activity will only increase.
The thing about video calling, though, is that it has been “just around the corner” for over 40 years, beginning with the AT&T Picturephone. According to Stanley Kubrick, we would be using them by 2001:
The cake model of product strategy is actually two different models for how to evolve and improve the scope of a product over time. I’ve found it’s a very helpful tool for helping teams think through what’s going to be a successful customer experience in the short term and the long term.
Model #1: Dry Cake
The first model shows the “dry cake” approach that many organizations plan out new products and experiences. They start with cake, then maybe add some filling, and then plan to add the icing as the final step. It makes sense from an…
I want to introduce you to a UX Week talk called “Data Informed, Not Data Driven” by Adam Mosseri, Product Design Manager at Facebook. While his talk focused on the role of data in design and decision making, I was more intrigued by the sub-text of the story, which I’ve synthesized as:
Innovation comes from creative cultures that value collaboration, informed risk-taking, transparency, and trust in one another to make decisions.
More magic that I culled from Adam’s talk:
The most successful teams are small and empowered to make decisions. Trust is a great motivator.
Good decisions…
I want to begin by giving a shout out to Tom Sieu founder of the R3 Lab at The Academy of Art University and the fall 2010 class. Thank you for inviting me to collaborate with you!
R3 is not just a class, it’s more of a mission—a call for future designers to pause and think about the bigger picture before making more STUFF. To be mindful of the environmental, cultural, societal, and economic implications of the information, products, and services they bring forth.
Tonight I begin my journey with the R3 Lab to Reimagine, Rethink, and Redesign better…