iA’s Oliver Reichenstein: Good Design is Invisible

An interview with the founder of iA / Information Architects, Oliver Reichenstein, who is well known for his design work for several European newspaper and his minimalist writing application called iA Writer.

He explores Swiss and Japanese Design Trends, the meaning of good design as well as the convergence of graphic design and industrial design.

Good user interface design takes care of irritations before they appear. Good design is invisible. Good screen design happens in the subatomic level of microtypography (the exact definition of a typeface), the invisible grid of macrotypography (how the typeface is used), and the invisible world of interaction design and information architecture. Minimum input, maximum output, with minimal conscious thought is what screen designers focus on.

Nothing is more destructive to good design than group thinking and collective decision making. Why? As I said, to most people good design is invisible. Group decisions focus on the visible, bad aspects of design.

A closer look at Apple’s Pricing Strategy

Apple is doing a lot of things right. Design, Supply Chain, Retail. Ryan Jones analyzed Apple’s pricing strategy and made the case for a 7-inch iPad. While many companies have a similar pricing strategy, it is the first time that I have seen such a chart for Apple products.

An Apple product for everyone. No matter what price they are willing to pay. Brilliantly executed.

The Google Project Glass Style Problem

Desireability is a key characteristics of successful products – it’s not enough that customers need a product, they need to want it, they need to desire it. Products such as the Segway and UMPCs show that technological innovations are not enough to create desireability in a larger users group. Google has recently presented their version of Project Glass and the question ultimately comes up: is this a product that a majority of users desires?

Is the Google Project Glass more than a technological marble and can it achieve desireability beyond a small group of geeks and early adopters. The traditional image of wearable computing shows a group of geeks that use glasses and other means to augment their reality. Below is a famous picture of the MIT Wearable Computing initiative in the mid 90s.

Google is positioning these products and aiming to address a broader market, trying to leave the geekyness behind and focus on the lifestyle element. Videos such as the one shown at the Google IO event aim to build the case that Google Project Glass are a fun product.

But is it enough? Vanessa Friedmann, fashtion editor of the Financial Times raises a good point that Google Glass has a style problem.

After all, the key to products with a long-life span (just ask Hermes, which has been selling Birkins for decades) is that they not only function well, but they are beautiful: they appeal to people’s aesthetic instincts. Steve Jobs understood this, which is partly why so many people are still happy to walk around with early generation iPhones and iPads. They may be outdated, but they still work, and THEY’RE SO PRETTY.

This is the typical Steve Jobs example, but she raises and even better argument in the next paragraph:

Once you get into products you wear, as opposed to carry in your pocket/handbag and pull out at opportune times, the style and appearance factor becomes exponentially more important: say you walk into a room and there’s an elegantly dressed man or woman wearing a sci-fi strip around their head; what would you think? A) CIA agent; B) Silicon Valley groupie; C) “wow, she looks good;” or D) What is that thing on her head?
Bet the answer isn’t C. And is D really the first impression we all want to make?

Unfortunately like most pundits, Vanessae does not give any suggestion but leaves this challenge to Google. Nevertheless I can see her point yet at the same time one has to remember that  the first mobile phones have been quite clunky and not a “pretty toy”.

It’s gonna be interesting to observe whether Google Project Glass turns into a new product category or whether it remains a toy for geeks and billionaires who got bored with running a search engine.

Customer-Centric Innovation with Storyboarding: The AirBnB Way

Storyboards are known from the world of movies and are only rarely connected with product development and innovation. Yet it turns out that storyboards can be a very useful tool to envision and prototype future customer experiences.

Brian Chesky, founder and CEO of Airbnb, shared with Techcrunch  how the company used storyboarding to develop a vision for the future of AirBnb:

Apparently a lot of Airbnb’s product roadmap came from something that the company called “Project Snow White.” Chesky said the inspiration came from reading a biography of Walt Disney, specifically the chapter about the production of Snow White. As the first feature-length animated film, Snow White was a big risk for Disney, but he was committed to creating characters who audience members would care about. With that in mind, Disney planned out the entire film in storyboards.

After reading that chapter, Chesky said he realized, “That’s our solution.” So the Airbnb team storyboarded the perfect travel experience for a guest and the perfect travel experience for the host. The company’s eventual goal is to offer tools that improve every frame of that storyboard, whether it involves how you post a listing or how you get to the airport.

Another example of defining the customer experience first and then working backwards to find solutions that will deliver this customer experience.

Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing: The One Academic Publication You Need To Read

It is often said that academia is disconnected from the reality of business and very often this is indeed the case. Nevertheless there is one publication in the field of marketing that has already transformed much of academia and I am convinced that it also helps practitioners deal with a changing competitive environment.

The publication “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing” has been published already in 2004 by Stephen L. Vargo & Robert F. Lusch and proposes a new dominant logic for marketing.

Marketing inherited a model of exchange from economics, which had a dominant logic based on the exchange of “goods,” which usually are manufactured output. The dominant logic focused on tangible resources, embedded value, and transactions.

Over the past several decades, new perspectives have emerged that have a revised logic focused on intangible resources, the cocreation of value, and relationships.

The authors believe that the new perspectives are converging to form a new dominant logic for marketing, one in which service provision rather than goods is fundamental to economic exchange.

The authors explore this evolving logic and the corresponding shift in perspective for marketing scholars, marketing practitioners, and marketing educators.

What has started as a controversial thesis has become a new direction in marketing and brings a completely new frame to look at problems. If you are applying this new service-dominant logic to marketing problems, you gain a new dimension to identify sources of competitive advantage.

The original publication is “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing” and has been extended in 2008 with the publication “Service-dominant logic: continuing the evolution“. They are academic but they will definitely also open up a new perspectice.

More information and more publications about the Service Dominant Logic can be found on the website of the authors at http://sdlogic.net/ 

The time has come to re-invent finance

Sean Park, founding investor in finance startups such as Betfair, Weatherbill or BankSimple has given an interesting talk at Lift Conference in Geneva titled Re-inventing Finance: An emerging (digital) reformation. While there is nothing truly groundbreaking, his talk gives an excellent overview where innovation is currently happening in the financial sector.

The message is clear: After other industries have already been disrupted by the power of the internet, the time has come that the financial industry will experience the same transformation we have seen before in other industries.

If you don’t find the time to watch the whole talk, make sure to at least check out his presentation on Prezi which gives you a good overview of the developments.

An Interview with Jonathan Ive, VP of Industrial Design at Apple

Insightful. Inspiring.

What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but then the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.

The nature of having ideas and creativity is incredibly inspiring. There is an idea which is solitary, fragile and tentative and doesn’t have form.

What we’ve found here is that it then becomes a conversation, although remains very fragile.

When you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation. But when you made a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea, and everything changes – the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.

Asked whether innovation is the result of solving problems

There are different approaches – sometimes things can irritate you so you become aware of a problem, which is a very pragmatic approach and the least challenging.

What is more difficult is when you are intrigued by an opportunity. That, I think, really exercises the skills of a designer. It’s not a problem you’re aware or, nobody has articulated a need. But you start asking questions, what if we do this, combine it with that, would that be useful? This creates opportunities that could replace entire categories of device, rather than tactically responding to an individual problem. That’s the real challenge, and that’s what is exciting.

Read the full interview in the London Evening Standard.

The Traits of Great Customer Experience Leaders

Are leaders and managers who are working in the customer experience domain different from their peers in other areas of an organization? My observation is that this is the case but what really makes them different has been something that was still an open question.

Recently I stumbled on a question on the Q&A site Quora about the innate traits of great product leaders and it seems to me that these traits also apply to great customer experience leaders:

Happily Dissatisfied

In order to be able to improve something, it is necessary to challenge the status quo. This also means to not be satisfied with the way things are done right now. Nevertheless this should not be a negative feeling that drags everybody down but rather act as the positive feeling that drives improvement.

Personally Involved

Managers are trained to delegate as much as possible and get things done through other people. Things are different for great customer experience leaders. They love to reach out to customers, they get involved in projects, they get emotionally invested to create better experiences. Sitting in the corner office and managing a customer experience team won‘t bring the desired results.

Decipherer of Customer Input

Collecting qualitative (user testing, input from customer service) and quantitative feedback (NPS, A/B, web analytics) is an essential task for every customer experience leader.  However, collecting data is not the main task. Deciphering which input is important, what the input is actually saying, and then turning that into the next great product is the task that requires thorough skills but that can also create the biggest impact.

Guided by an Overall Vision and Philosophy

Customer experience leaders are not just driven by the necessary immediate improvements to make a customer‘s journey more pleasurable and meet annual performance goals. In many cases they are also driven by a very strong vision or philosophy that acts as the guiding frame or vision for all activities. This vision very often develops into a guiding vision that is picked up by top-management to drive throughout the organization.

Thinking in Leaps, Iterating in Steps

Envisioning a future state is one thing, getting there is the real challenge. The ability to envision a desired future state of customer experience and the ability to derive concrete steps that can be taken today to get a step closer to this state is essential.

Excellent Communicators

Communicating your own activities and achievements is always important task. Customer experience leader take new ideas and spread them not just within an organization but also in the customers head. Only great communicators who are able to connect with individuals on different levels – from top-management down to a customer – are able to achieve results.

Focus

Improving the customer experience of an organization tends to be a huge undertaking with a lot of areas that need to be worked on. Spreading the ideas of a new customer experience vision throughout an organization is necessary to create support and momentum to achieve any change at all. The risk is that these efforts are spread out too thin and action gets substituted by talk. Customer experience leaders continuously focus on very concrete projects to achieve results. These results are then translated into „stories of change“ that are then spread within the organization.

The Conclusion: More than an Intellectual Exercise

Is such a discussion more than just an intellectual exercise? I do believe so because the abilities required from a customer experience leader within an organization are different from other positions. By giving clarity to this question it is possible to get a better understanding and ultimately recruit and train individuals to take on these leadership positions.

Group Brainstorming vs. Thinking in Solitude: Where do breakthrough ideas come from?

Which environment is most conducive for the emergence of breakthrough ideas? Are breakthrough ideas developed in solitude? Or are they created in a group of highly energetic people sharing ideas, brainstorming and sketching out solutions.

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.”