tips on how to “stay creative”:
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The Key To A Unified Brand: A Consistent UI
“Adding designers to your staff won’t make much of a difference if the organization can’t understand its customer needs or create a brand-consistent digital ecosystem that serves those needs.”
As I’m sure you’re aware, “in a world full of sameness, design can act as a key differentiator.” In order to successfully design in a tasteful and compelling way, designers must avoid:
- “Expert” design: When the design of a product (or service) is discussed without understanding the needs of those who will be using it. Not only is it risky, but also without user insight and feedback, you have little way of knowing whether your new product will resonate with its intended audience.
- Siloed design: “When the design of a product (or service) occurs without a truly cross-functional and collaborative team effort–that is, when design happens in its own functional silo within an organization.” More often than not, as a result, the finished product fails to mirror what the designer had intended.
Designers are in an ideal position to observe, interpret, and model back a different way of working. No more Design or Web team, separate from the mobile team, separate from the development team. The unifying principles that guide these teams should center around what customers actually need, not what new technologies we want to throw at them. This “different way of working” should be a guide for all designers, and team members as a whole.
“While there’s certainly a ton of disruption (and serious failure) happening across many industries that long thought they were invincible, there are some incredibly bright spots across the businesses that are reconsidering a new way of working so that design’s true values can be brought forward.”
Dear stuck-in-my-old-way companies,
I challenge you to re-think the way you’ve been working. For instance, present your new ideas and concepts in an informal brainstorm session. Encourage any and all users for their feedback, and as early as possible. “Get out of the design vacuum [and] bring other perspectives to the table”.
If you don’t have plans at 7PM, than you should come join us. Mona Patel, CEO of Motivate Design, is volunteering in a panel discussion at WeWork Lounge in Soho. Come, meet our team, and ask Mona, the master mind behind Motivate Design, all the questions you want about what goes on inside “the mind of an entrepreneur”.
“… can be used responsibly as a powerful tool to shape human behavior and to create a preferable future.”
The 21st Century is about improving lives by design.
It’s about shaping behavior for preferable outcomes, which isn’t easy, therefore we need to ask ourselves: How do we shape behavior, through the design of our products, to get to these “preferable outcomes”?
- Focus on positive outcomes and rely on your beliefs
- Think about both the positive outcomes as well as the undesirable outcomes
- Consider an ethical framework
- Capitalize upon the growing understanding of persuasive technology (design)
Designers have been influencing behavior for a very long time. For instance, “Graphic Design has generally been concerned with either the visual communication of information (implying static transfer of knowledge but not behavioral change) or the creation of attractive, eye-catching, coherent brand stories (attempting to encourage consumer purchasing and loyalty).” “This design concerned itself with changing or shaping attitudes and emotions toward brands and engaging their rational sensibilities.” This ability to change the behavior of the users is something new. Moreover, one of the clearest findings in the emerging area of “persuasive design” is that you can give people all the facts, create the most informative and attractive communications materials, and still not to get them to change their behavior.
Designers are now armed with a growing set of persuasive techniques for shaping behavior and with this great power comes great responsibility. Those who understand and have a basic knowledge of irrational behavior and decision-making, will be better off in creating solutions for some of the 21st century’s most wicked problems.
Big Takeaways:
“Corporate interests that are aligned to preferable outcomes will be the only way to sustain profitability in the 21st century.”
At this moment, we will discuss the 3 most innovative social sites out there claimed by Inc.com
Realistically, these “most innovative” sites will be a thing of the past within the next month. So, lets review while we’re still ahead of the game.
uEver have the urge to brand your own soda? If so, check out uFlavor.
uFlavor allows consumers to create and customize their own drink for a business, brand, or event. After a drink is customized, users have the option to share it with the public. As a result, the public is given the option to vote on your drink. A royalty distribution is sent to the inventor with every purchase.
I agree that the social sharing potential is the most interesting aspect of the venture, as star athletes, musicians and even enterprises will be able to promote their brands. Not to mention, social movements will be able to promote themselves while raising money.
“uFlavor estimates that its full-scale custom drink creation platform will be available by the end of this year.” The success of uFlavor depends on vending machine distribution crafted with a smart search tool to comb the database of millions of drink mixes.
On the way is the ability to create your own flavors… uh oh. It’s too bad I don’t drink soda, but that doesn’t mean I won’t create a drink for the sake of creating. Perhaps Motivate Design will have its own drink? Perhaps.
How it works:
1) Submit your invention idea to the Quirky community
2) The community crowd will vote your idea up or down and/or add comments and feedback to your idea
3) The crowd chooses the top 10 ideas each week
4) The Quirky staff then chooses the top 2 ideas for product development
The ideas are chosen based on design, market and viability. If the idea is good enough, Quirky will prototype, refine and ultimately develop your product. Following development, the product will be up for sale, at which point the goal will be to reach the sales threshold. “This threshold is the number of sales necessary to warrant full-scale product development.” A successful threshold sale will get the ‘green light’ and the product will be sold through the Quirky website as well as retail partners, one being Bed Bath and Beyond. The product inventor in return receives royalty checks whenever his or her respective invention is sold.
I give you permission to leave this blog and submit an idea immediately. It’s a good idea.
Quora “relies on the thought leadership of knowledgeable professionals to offer quality answers to users’ questions.” The community members promote their own social profiles and expertise by providing quality answers to questions by other Quora members. All Quora members are able to vote answers up or down, which also contributes to answer quality and gets all users involved.
“These are the types of platforms that, even if they don’t pan out perfectly the first time, inspire more people to think, try and ultimately succeed.”
Well, maybe not famous, but definitely talented.
Since we pride ourselves on having such smart, motivated, etc. etc. employees, it’s only expected I share her “SpongeBob’s Super Bouncy Fun Time HD” iTunes app.
While studying at Parsons School of Design, Chris interned at MTV. While there, she worked on the designs for an array of game apps. This one, in particular, just so happened to launch. For this app design, Chris worked alongside a team of developers and designers, conducting research and creating mockups for the design of the application.
Breakdown:
Throughout the past 50 years, “we’ve been innovating the way we innovate” through different approaches. These different approaches are both intuitive as well as counter-intuitive.
The intuitive approaches to innovation are obvious: In a collaborative fashion, encouraging smart people, who have intelligent and creative ideas, to share and create ground-breaking change.
The counter-intuitive approaches are not so obvious, as it requires understanding that many large break throughs do not come through large insight; rather they come through small steps such as prototyping and ultimately figuring out how to make something truly valuable for the community and team.
It’s crucial to pull people with an array of skills, as “there are a billion IQ’s out there if you know how to tap into them”
Here’s the funny thing with social innovation:
- If you don’t measure it, it doesn’t operate very well
- It’s difficult to manage and unless you manage properly, you won’t get what you want from it
- It’s hard to figure out if you’re on the right track or if you’ve gone askew
The organizations that do it well measure 4 things:
INPUT: measuring people and assessing whether or not they have the right tools or materials to consider for the future; are the quality of ideas appropriate?
PROCESS: generating and selecting the best ideas and moving at a fast speed, especially because “moving slow can be death to an idea”
OUTPUTS: are these ideas coming out? are projects being launched? are results obtained from the projects?
OUTCOMES: measuring the net benefit and creating a whole new market through innovation
Was there an important measurable benefit in health and welfare (in terms of social innovation)??
I’ve attached an info graphic on “should you send that email?”
Lets discuss the explosion of email: “There’s too much of it, no one can agree on how to use it, it’s too easy to send, which encourages a glut of CYA CCing, and there are spammers.”
This flowchart will help you decide whether or not it’s worth sending that email. Take a look and then decide:
As I was confirming details for our newly established JAM Sessions, I felt the need to be inspired. Upon fulfilling that need, I came across a blog post about UX thinking for start-ups. It was posted by a user experience professional, who has worked in the web industry for over a decade.
His name? Rather keep it private, as I didn’t ask permission to share it. Oops!
I asked this professional:
On your blog a bit ago, you discussed UX Startups and that UX is a new way of thinking about the customer engagement. Can you elaborate on this? Also, I’d love to hear what you think is the best way to get these new ventures to dominate their customer experience, specifically the tools, etc.
This professional commented:
“Basically start-ups tend to be engineering or business focused… thinking about the end product / service and getting it shipped / launched. UX is best served as a philosophy ingrained in the business’s culture (see Apple) putting user needs as a priority (see Zappos) which are balanced between technical requirements and business objectives. To do this they need to understand who their users are and what they want (see NYT article on Target), then their product or service needs to be tested with users (see The $300 Million Dollar Button). Ignoring this would be a disaster (see Netflix). If a start-up focused on UX in this fashion they will win over the competition hands down (see UX Fund).
Since I had no idea what UX Fund was, I looked it up. It was an investment experiment inspired by Jeneanne Rae and the Design Council. They invested $50,000 USD (about $5,000 in each company) on November 1, 2006. Shares had to be held for 1 year. They believed companies that deliver a great user experience will see it reflected in their stock price.
Commentary by the experimentalists: “as promised :http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/?p=122 we’ve put our money where our mouths are. Last night and this morning we purchased about $50,000 worth of stock in companies that we feel have great user experiences. We’re working on live feeds for our fund tracking page.”
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