@bitpakkit

bitpakkit top tracks on ReverbNation for 2011

2011-12-24T15:43:00.001-08:00

Throughout most of the year I have been in the top forty, often in the top ten, on ReverbNation for electronica in my region. If you are on an iDevice you can get the same versions of these tracks at soundcloud.com/bitpakkit or in the Soundcloud app.

Posted via email from bitpakkit

The Social Consumer (Infographic)

2011-12-07T13:51:00.000-08:00

The social consumer, all data'd up in the infographic below from M Booth and Beyond, lays out the differences between different types of sharers and purchasers. This unintentional category is getting a lot of focus lately. By unintentional, I postulate that consumers who also participate in social networks would likely never self identify as such.

The Social Consumer (Infographic)

2011-12-07T13:48:00.000-08:00

The social consumer, all data'd up in the infographic below from M Booth and Beyond, lays out the differences between different types of sharers and purchasers. This unintentional category is getting a lot of focus lately. By unintentional, I mean that consumers who participate in social networks would likely never self identify as such.

The World of Social Media in 2011

2011-12-04T10:03:00.000-08:00

VideoInfographs shares The World of Social Media in a video infographic that snapshots much of the critical topline data we amassed in 2011.

The smartphone goes to college, every day, every class...always on.

2011-10-31T21:49:00.000-07:00

I bite my tongue and press Publish Post.

Created by: HackCollege

Modeling the Mobile User Experience

2011-10-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

Working on a story around mobile UX and I was reminded of this brilliant and thoughtful presentation from fellow Canadian, Bryan Rieger.

Modeling the Mobile User Experience

View more presentations from Bryan Rieger

The way he breaks down the challenge of the definition of design in mobile, and reconstructs a more appropriate lexicon for us is unmatched. Worth a breeze through for the lawn chair example alone...are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?

I also like to write music...

2011-09-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

I am fortunate to have had some extra time lately between road trips and press interviews while we do some calibration and I have been using that to work on my music. I thought I would share that with you, since most folks don't know I also do this.

I would really appreciate any and all feedback and you taking any time at all to listen!

You can find even more of my music at:
http://soundcloud.com/bitpakkit
http://reverbnation.com/bitpakkit

Curiosity and rigor in creative

2011-09-23T05:07:00.001-07:00

Andrew Zuckerman: On Curiosity, Rigor, and Learning As You Go from 99% on Vimeo.

Anna Karenina and the Consumerization Challenge

2011-08-04T06:24:00.000-07:00

A lot of micro trends driving the move to more focus on customer experience have evolved around the theme of the consumerization of IT. According to Wikipedia, "Consumerization is a stable neologism that describes the trend for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business organizations, resulting in the convergence of the IT and consumer electronics industries, and a shift in IT innovation from large businesses to the home. For example, many people now find that their home based IT equipment and services are both more capable and less expensive than what is provided in their workplace. The term, consumerization, was first popularized by Douglas Neal and John Taylor of CSC's Leading Edge Forum in 2001 and is one of the key drivers of the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 movements."

This classic view of Commercialization likely needs an update. (Source: Wikipedia)
This definition definitely leans on and drives towards the consumer electronics industry and is often reflective of the advanced capabilities and better user experience that we get on home devices. In part this trend is responsible for the rebound of Apple, as business users, developers and others started to choose Apple hardware based on the idea that it was easier to use.
But there is a trend hidden within this phenomenon that makes consumerization too simplistic by definition. Do you remember the Anna Karenina principle, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way"? Tolstoy meant that in order for a marriage to succeed many factors had to be in place, but failure in a single aspect could spell doom even when many of the ingredients were there. In his book Guns, Germs and Steel - The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond uses this to to make the point that we tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, success actually requires avoiding many separate causes of failure.
Ultimately the business models of consumer electronics and services do not lend themselves directly to supporting enterprise business models. In a recent discussion with an (unnamed) enterprise security firm from Canada we were talking about the issues with securing iPad devices in a way that enterprise find suitable for storing data. What I found most interesting was that this same consumerization trend was driving adoption for cloud-based applications that would absolutely remain secure even if a device was stolen, as long as the device could merely be wiped and not accessed. Because business buyers are essentially a niche market for many consumer manufacturers there is often only a minimal bar set with essential services and often these simply extend capabilities that are already needed for consumers. Yes, others will move in the market to make things more enterprise-ready but this is a bolt-on strategy that mystifies accountability and often introduces additional points of failure.
In parallel to this increased awareness and concern around consumer electronics in the enterprise there are a plethora of service types that are essentially enterprise versions of broadly adopted consumer applications. Micro-blogging platforms in the enterprise provide all the familiarity and connection benefits that their consumer counterparts offer but prevent access to the purely consumer aspects such as social games or 'interacting' with celebrities.
Consumerization is by definition a process. Private infrastructure is built out to first support early adopters inclusive of distribution, support, related services and accessories. In much the same way, businesses also build out private infrastructure that is to be owned and used by the business, not individuals. When the service types overlap or collide we have no choice but to compare and contrast from both a business and personal perspective and this ultimately fosters a unique form of competitive tension. What is unique is that as end users we compare and ultimately voice frustration when things are perceived to be more cumbersome or difficult to use more than ever. The shortest route to a solution for IT is then to either define a happy medium or simply embrace the consumerized approach and work to make it enterprise-ready. Various people have observed already that users don't really make mistakes any more - instead systems and applications were not built to support their needs and that's why they fail.
There are countless examples of where this has succeeded and been adopted at mass scale and now we even have examples of those wins fading in favour of new consumer-driven approaches. For example, instant messaging as a platform faces competitive pressure as people switch to more social applications that combine personal and shared messaging services. Many of the applications we use to collaborate or work together support instant messaging as well so more more frequently we see the patterns move into context of other tasks.
Photo: Adobe's new Vibe micro-blogging platform, for internal use only from the Adobe@Adobe team.
Everything About Everyone Everywhere
Right now many high-tech marketers and avid social media users both inside and outside the firewall are faced with a net new challenge. For example, we have invested heavily in Twitter and in some cases had some wins on Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, a corporate blog and other platforms to help us work better and smarter across these arenas. In the last few short weeks I have already 'circled' more than 100 Adobe employees making their move to Google+. Similar to many other organizations we immediately begin to think how we could use this platform for our brand, events and products - with the obvious choice being to do something similar to what we have done on Facebook with perhaps a little more 'blog' thrown in.
It was a welcome relief to get the invite to sign up for the Google+ for Business alpha, which will launch later this year for a couple reasons. First, simply repeating what we already do somewhere else did not seem too exciting but more importantly, knowing that Google was going to focus on building a set of services that were unique and meant for businesses means that we can take advantage of that effort and thinking and not try to fit a square peg in a circle. One could argue that the consumerization essentially needs to be more complete in order for businesses to succeed on the platform anyway. And Google+ really is for people, not avatars or brands or businesses or products, but for people to share, converse and communicate in new ways. You can do this on behalf of your business obviously and many are already, but we are doing this as ourselves, as individuals. Will we always be working to consumerize IT?
It was this overall line of thinking that got me on to the last question there. We had effectively consumerized IT, but were we essentially bound to have to do this over and over again? To take products and services that were meant for consumers and adapt our infrastructures, policies, habits and goals such that we could tolerate its idiosyncrasies and still be effective as employees and teams and grow our businesses accordingly. Or...
Are we moving into an era where we can expect others to do the work needed to commercialize and industrialize consumer patterns and practices? Are we better to take the best practices, methodologies, technologies and platforms and make them enterprise-ready such that we don't face the compromises and downsides that come with all that awesome-ness, ease-of-use and ready to adopt paradigms? Clearly the platform-as-a-service ideology has major differences when it comes to consumer and business best practices. For example:

The notion of my personal groups of friends and family does not really translate to teams and organizations. The latter are much more implicit and ultimately need be automated. I wouldn't expect Facebook to know when my cousin has a baby, but I would expect an enterprise platform to know when a customer subscription expires or a team member changes roles.
My personal data is mine and while I seek to protect it in one way when I am sharing things in a personal network I have a whole different level of expectations about how my employer will ultimately protect and keep my data safe.

We essentially need to have two identities but we are learning to blend them through brute force. PHOTO - Peretz Partensky
I don't know anyone who thinks that the blending of work and family or personal life is perfect on social networks and this creates this sort of safe version of ourselves. We can't ultimately share everything about our personal lives with our co-workers nor can we share things with family and friends that needs to be kept internal to a company. So what we do is tame both ends of that spectrum and ultimately, from what I see, this creates an incomplete identity. But, currently its the best we have so we go with it and we select those co-workers who we feel more comfortable around to share some of the more personal things we are doing. But we rarely do this with our customers or partners for obvious reasons and here is where it breaks down. The fundamental need to engage with our customers and partners in order to realize the full value of social is handicapped before we even get out the door by a necessary and logical gate we put in place.
Social as an ingredient technology has already made considerable inroads in the enterprise and is often the key to success for steering relevant conversations back into our domain. Here at Adobe we have supported this movement with technologies such as Adobe Connect and Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service, but we see the need to go way beyond this in terms of providing a whole solution (and we are).
To me, the point of these intersections and challenges seems to be that we have arrived at a tipping point, a sort of crossroads in what is appropriate and safe and doable and we are now faced with a new challenge. We have consumerized IT but we have not (often enough) commercialized or industrialized the patterns that support this to the extent that they need to be in order to realized their full potential. Imagine that you had invested millions of dollars in a physical mail and logistics system to support shipments and communications and a new platform came along to support electronic mail and simply based on user preference you suddenly had to invest in dual infrastructure and support new security topology in order to…um, never mind.
The platforms we have are already widely adopted for social brand engagement and corporate communications and even employee communications and the conversation has started. I think we have yet to see the full commercialization of consumer platforms and I think there is a lot of untapped opportunity still locked up in our inability to effectively connect these two worlds. I expect that the platforms will continue to evolve to meet this and that the focus on great user experiences based on existing patterns, cloud-ready services, easy integration points and passion for collaboration will combine with the need for security, privacy, versioning, multi-channel delivery and more to build a path for consumer technologies and services to ultimately plateau in the enterprise.
More than ever with the multiple points of connection between all of us at work, at conferences, on social media and through shared information consumption, we have learned to do this collaboratively as an ecosystem. We need to continue sharing ideas, developing standards and hardening the patterns that are going to succeed and not be subject so easily to the next whim of user preference being a force for wholesale change. Adapt to adopt - or learn from the patterns we see people migrating towards and build them into our lives and work in a way that ultimately suits all aspects of our proposed lifelong marriage to technology.

Contextography

2011-05-31T10:53:00.001-07:00

Reposted from IMHO.

In today's brief customer journeys, customer experience professionals are both artists and scientists collaborating on behalf of our most important benefactor. As artists we want to visualize and experiment with these benefactor touch points but there is this wall of complexity around how we intelligently scribe and simulate a million points of light from a hundred thousand journeys. As scientists we seek to simulate and experiment with our learnings and shape them into thesis or ultimately repeatable models.

If you follow Gartner's thinking around context-aware technologies, it is clear that C- level executives need to seriously consider the disruption that context-aware technologies will have on purchasing and loyalty behavior. Gartner identifies context-aware technologies as the ones that influence consumer purchase decisions by using information about the consumer's context (e.g., location and interests) to offer more-relevant promotions, content and recommendations. Smartphones and tablets armed with context-aware apps will influence consumer spending as much in nonelectronic channels (e.g., physical stores) as in e-commerce and the technology will primarily be used to shift consumer spending from one competitor to another. It does point out that is less likely that it will increase consumer spending overall. The customer journey, when taken into consideration at a touch point, must be considered in context.

What is the taxonomy of this union of art and science, this cartography of a journey and ethnography of a participant, perhaps individual or en masse as an audience? What are the unifying factors and measurable, logical groups of data that we can ultimately action? We have more than enough market data to understand that context in its totality has all the facets of data needed to optimize a behavior. But context is the thing itself, what then would we call the process of understanding and leveraging the learning of context? I propose:

Contextography - n. - the collection, study, analysis, measurement and resulting use of context. e.g. For the purpose of this article, the user speaks in italics to help you empathize with data gained through contextography.**

I'm on a horse. You knew that. right?

First let's meet a user and their context. In the same way that Old Spice imagined how women might like to see the men in their lives in order to have men in turn see themselves through that lens, we are constantly anticipating an audience and their needs, desires and motivations. I am hoping that I have anticipated your need to better understand how context is made actionable even if I am really only able start another conversation at this inflection.

While we have gotten better at allowing users to manage their account, their profile, and even how they share their activity with other customers or users of a product or service, we also have had to learn over time to consume that data intelligently and understand patterns that emerge and perhaps express these as context. The parameters that are relevant for the context can be broken down in different dimensions. For the purpose of this short journey we will give our user, which could be me, some context.

Me, the user, of course: Sometimes you and sometimes me, but always everything that characterizes the customer, perhaps demo-, psycho- and ethno- graphic.

My situation: That which describes the circumstances in which the user interaction takes place and the process and result of interaction. Relevant parameters for this include the channel of the interaction, the device made use of, the location, and the network that is used to connect and the facilities that enable this.

My history of interactions: That which we know and are able to share about the relationship between the user and your enterprise. Relevant information include buying history, contracts, support cases, and any other information that characterizes the business relationship.

I'm at a touchpoint. It's pretty. It doesn't work the way I expected.

A user’s experience is always dependent on a defined relationship between a business activity and that user’s goals. While the experience may take many forms, there are commonalities in the approach to arrive at a final experience, and this process is the practice of user experience (UX). The disciplines essentially map to the outputs of this process and typically include:

Interface design - the graphics and branding.
Interaction design - the method by which users interact, e.g. touch and voice.
Information architecture - the visible organizing principle for content and applications.
Graphic design - the brand treatment, color palette and treatment of text and media

Technologists, behaving like scientists, strive to have applications widely adopted are essentially questing for patterns; patterns to users means that there are functions in those applications that are repeatably useful, usable, easy to find, credible, and ultimately successful at solving an identified problem or achieving a known goal. As the increase in focus on great customer experience matures, so in turn does the practice and rigor associated with defining the patterns of engagement. It's fair to think of increased investments in great user experience as a discovery of true patterns - the right investments presented in the context required for the right happy customers and happy employees to use your apps.

I know what awesome is. You and I are on the same page.

Essentially, most investments in user experience within the enterprise today amount to superficial and cosmetic changes applied as afterthoughts in an attempt to solve apparent and predictable problems with the surface of the application. Often, people focus on type size, color, and other basic design, and believe that they have created a great customer experience. The reality is that this approach only goes so far in addressing problems and is ultimately going to fail since the user-focused work was started much too late in the process. Business users often make the mistake of masking the lack of user input with cool technology, and while this world of wonder can fascinate to the point of going viral, it often lacks the deep engagement intended.

I don't make mistakes, you do. I recently redefined the customer is always right. I did this for you.

The later in a project you invest in change, the more it costs. There are a number of methodologies in use today across the industry that are purported to facilitate user input into the design and development process - beware the linear, embrace the cyclical, and mandate the agile. In this way we appropriately recognize that users don't really blame themselves for things going wrong the way that they used to. That was convenient because it presented an opportunity to teach someone how to use a system in the way it was intended. Now the table is turned and the system must work in the way that is expected.

I'm on a journey. I have a map. Embrace my journey.

Many of the guidelines from analysts and industry experts have identified a key tool in this process to be a map of all the customer touchpoints across an enterprise. This map can be used in several strategic ways:

Identify and plot persona against specific actions or opportunities.
Understand and modify business processes in order to overcome obstacles or bottlenecks.
Inform design and technology choices and prioritize resources against those choices
Measure success by defining Key Performance Indicators (KPI) based on customer activities.
Refine opportunities for increased productivity by aggregating logical groups of actions.

I'm in your systems. I'm doing this fast.

Finally, we need to reflect the outcomes of design in our application architecture. In a functional architecture we can surface this experience layer to bridge the “last mile” gap between user and business application. This layer essentially represents the presentation layer of applications (e.g., interaction models such as touch) with knowledge of domain, integration, and the associated infrastructure. True multichannel delivery is thus enabled through an abstraction of presentation that intentionally separates the channel, controls, and interaction from the fundamental underlay of business logic and application code.

This abstraction serves a unique purpose in planning and development. By creating handshakes between the UX professionals who own the experience and developers who own the implementation of the application, we in turn empower handshakes between customers and the business.

For example, wireframes that represent the experience layer and interaction model can be made interactive in such a way as to represent the potential interaction, and elsewhere in the team those interactions can be wired to the application and business logic. These can be tested with actual customers or users in order to further refine logic, interaction models, and general usability themes such as accessibility, both prior to implementation and over time.

Suck less. Be awesome more. Please.

A user’s experience is impacted by many things beyond our control as designers, such as network issues, device or operating system issues, IT policies, or even physical distractions. What is within our control is exhibiting a shared understanding of goals and interaction capabilities and providing this in a consistent way to support the brands we represent.

One could choose platforms and tools that effectively reduce the time it takes for you to develop the final experience with a component model based on UX best practices. For example, here at Adobe, we are working hard to maintain a domain model that is essentially pre-integrated with relevant technology services and infrastructure, and abstract this from the presentation layer such that you can reuse or strip away and replace at whim. Not your whim, but that of your customer's oft-fickle hearts and minds. In this way you can adapt to changes in contextual trends at the edges of your business, and put your new passion for contextography to work helping to sustain and grow your business.

I'm done. Listen for my feedback.

** Re: Contextography. I honestly had no idea that someone else had made the word up before I did but Google was helpful in setting me straight on that. Recognizing the definition potentially already in place actually helps me build on that to an expanded definition that is first of all both representative and inclusive of the user POV, and more importantly one that embraces all aspects of a digital environment, not only images of a fictitious one. I should point out that more recently I have been made aware of a definition of this term that is similar to a bibliography for a paper or thesis - essentially tracking the context of sources. I love that definition and my only regret was that I was not personally encouraged to add contextographies to my papers when I was a student many (many, many) years ago.

I have registered the domain Contextography.com to build a body of research and work in the areas of definition, research and analysis of both the art and science of context. In parallel to that we will also be tracking the context conversation here - @contextography (sorry to any fans of @uxpectations, that chapter is now complete for me) and I will bring the first few months of this together for a talk on this subject at the upcoming Adobe Digital Enterprise Summit in October. Register for VIP invite here.

Special thanks to Hank Barnes, Craig Randall and Jamie Anderson for additional insights and thoughts, and to the extended community for the inspiration and motivation to get this idea off the napkin.

Posted via email from bitpakkit

Data is the interface

2011-05-27T07:05:00.001-07:00

Increasing user and experience designer focus on data visualization as a means to explore and represent large amounts of data has given us increasingly sophisticated understanding of this emerging interface.

Both compelling and beautiful, awkward and interesting, the consumption of large tomes of data is increasingly made both accessible and actionable - and artists and scientists come together to continually evolve how we might increase the use and value of this medium.

Amplify’d from konigi.com

"Artist Aaron Koblin takes vast amounts of data -- and at times vast numbers of people -- and weaves them into stunning visualizations. From elegant lines tracing airline flights to landscapes of cell phone data, from a Johnny Cash video assembled from crowd-sourced drawings to the "Wilderness Downtown" video that customizes for the user, his works brilliantly explore how modern technology can make us more human."

Beautiful, incredibly creative use of user contributed hands for data-driven art.
Read more at konigi.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a13yt9

The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century

2011-05-17T14:56:00.001-07:00

The headline says it all...can't wait for my copy to arrive.

Amplify’d from adage.com

At first, one wonders how Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz ever managed to write "The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century," when the man himself was a cipher during his own lifetime and is largely unknown today.

But then you wonder how to write a review of this admirable and well-written biography without discussing the man himself?

So let's start by recapping the highlights: He discovered two of the most important creatives of all time (John E. Kennedy and Claude C. Hopkins), and revolutionized the advertising industry by the time he was 30. He was deeply involved in the Leo Frank case, was majority owner of the Chicago Cubs, helped reorganize baseball after the Black Sox scandal, helped get a president elected, ran the United States Shipping Board, and was a key player in the invention of the soap opera, in the launch of Kotex and Kleenex and Sunkist, and in the transformation of political campaigns. And, when he dissolved his agency, Lord & Thomas, in 1946, he created the iconic Foote Cone & Belding (the "FCB" of "DraftFCB") and then spent the last decade of his life donating the substantial sums of money (and marketing expertise) he'd accrued to galvanize such causes as birth control (inventing the name "Planned Parenthood") and cancer (renaming "The American Society for the Control of Cancer" the "American Cancer Society"), finally establishing the Lasker Award -- often called the "American Nobel prize."

And what have you done lately?
Read more at adage.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a138ev

Top 10 Things That Are Not Killing Us

2011-05-17T08:53:00.001-07:00

With recent news around all of the unavoidable and avoidable activities that are killing us, I thought it prudent to ponder a list of the Top 10 Things that are not killing us. Here they go, in no particular order, with absolutely no scientific backup (also a trend on a lot of health-related posts).

1) Being happy.
Several prominent authors who seem quite happy share their beliefs that being happy is actually very good for us. Choose the physiological or spiritual POV on this activity. Just smiling may be good enough.

2) Meditation or prayer.
Being in touch with your spiritual self is critical to basic skills like self-awareness, confidence, empowerment and a healthy attitude (especially this last part). As long as you are not dropping on your knees in a war zone or meditating when you should be medicating this should be a sustainable priority.

3) Helping others.
It's the little things that count. Do something for someone today, no matter how small.

4) Contributing to charity.
No studies whatsoever indicate any harmful side effects of sponsoring charities or charitable events.

5) Eating healthy.
Choose green, choose local, choose balanced. Eat regularly, it's good. CAUTION: Avoid anything you are allergic to.

6) Standing up.
I would have said sitting up straight but apparently that still kills you. It follows that if sitting is shortening our lives, then standing up within tolerable levels should not be any risk.

7) Great sex.
Actually, any sex perhaps. Assuming you are of an appropriate age, have no pre-conditions that will harm you from exertion, and like this kind of thing you should proceed at will, as available and where consent allows (of course).

8) Updating your status.
As long as you are not provoking war, political dissent or exposing your infidelity, social media has actually been proven by someone/somewhere to be good for you. I think so anyway, and in social media that is mostly what matters.

9) Paying your taxes.
I know from experience that not paying them on time can cause stress. Since death and taxes are both absolutes, you should choose this one annually in favor of the other. If you need the money to cure a life-threatening disease, leverage your own ability to prioritize.

10) Celebrating success.
While certain forms of celebration, or activities undertaken during celebration, may have adverse health risks, the simple act of acknowledging exceptional behavior or important milestones is an important part of creating positive memories about your life. You can only partake in this activity directly while you are living, so you should think up a reason now.

Unofficial #11 - Creating a top ten list that fits somewhere in the stack of useless internet journalism that is amusing for short periods of time.
Disclaimer: I have no definitive proof of anything nor do I actually believe anything I have ever read in a Top 10 list.

Posted via email from bitpakkit

Top 10 Things That Are Not Killing Us

2011-05-17T08:50:00.002-07:00

With recent news around all of the unavoidable and avoidable activities that are killing us, I thought it prudent to ponder a list of the Top 10 Things that are not killing us. Here they go, in no particular order, with absolutely no scientific backup (also a trend on a lot of health-related posts).

1) Being happy.
Several prominent authors who seem quite happy share their beliefs that being happy is actually very good for us. Choose the physiological or spiritual POV on this activity. Just smiling may be good enough.

2) Meditation or prayer.
Being in touch with your spiritual self is critical to basic skills like self-awareness, confidence, empowerment and a healthy attitude (especially this last part). As long as you are not dropping on your knees in a war zone or meditating when you should be medicating this should be a sustainable priority.

3) Helping others.
It's the little things that count. Do something for someone today, no matter how small.

4) Contributing to charity.
No studies whatsoever indicate any harmful side effects of sponsoring charities or charitable events.

5) Eating healthy.
Choose green, choose local, choose balanced.

6) Standing up.
I would have said sitting up straight but apparently that still kills you. It follows that if sitting is shortening our lives, then standing up within tolerable levels should not be any risk.

7) Great sex.
Actually, any sex perhaps. Assuming you are of an appropriate age, have no pre-conditions that will harm you from exertion, and like this kind of thing you should proceed at will, as available and where consent allows (of course).

8) Updating your status.
As long as you are not provoking war, political dissent or exposing your infidelity, social media has actually been proven by someone, somewhere, to be good for you.

9) Paying your taxes.
I know from experience that not paying them on time can cause stress. Since death and taxes are both absolutes, you should choose this one annually in favor of the other. If you need the money to cure a life-threatening disease, leverage your own ability to prioritize.

10) Celebrating success.
While certain forms of celebration, or activities undertaken during celebration, may have adverse health risks, the simple act of acknowledging exceptional behavior or important milestones is an important part of creating positive memories about your life. You can only partake in this activity directly while you are living, so you should think up a reason now.

Unofficial #11 - Creating a top ten list that fits somewhere in the stack of useless internet journalism that is amusing for short periods of time.

Disclaimer: I have no definitive proof of anything nor do I actually believe anything I have ever read in a Top 10 list.

Top 10 Things That Are Not Killing Us

2011-05-17T08:50:00.000-07:00

With recent news around all of the unavoidable and avoidable activities that are killing us, I thought it prudent to ponder a list of the Top 10 Things that are not killing us. Here they go, in no particular order, with absolutely no scientific backup (also a trend on a lot of health-related posts).

1) Being happy.
Several prominent authors who seem quite happy share their beliefs that being happy is actually very good for us. Choose the physiological or spiritual POV on this activity. Just smiling may be good enough.

2) Meditation or prayer. Being in touch with your spiritual self is critical to basic skills like self-awareness, confidence, empowerment and a healthy attitude (especially this last part). As long as you are not dropping on your knees in a war zone or meditating when you should be medicating this should be a sustainable priority.

3) Helping others.
It's the little things that count. Do something for someone today, no matter how small.

4) Contributing to charity.
No studies whatsoever indicate any harmful side effects of sponsoring charities or charitable events.

5) Eating healthy.
Choose green, choose local, choose balanced.

6) Standing up.
I would have said sitting up straight but apparently that still kills you. It follows that if sitting is shortening our lives, then standing up within tolerable levels should not be any risk.

7) Great sex.
Actually, any sex perhaps. Assuming you are of an appropriate age, have no pre-conditions that will harm you from exertion, and like this kind of thing you should proceed at will, as available and where consent allows (of course).

8) Updating your status.
As long as you are not provoking war, political dissent or exposing your infidelity, social media has actually been proven by someone, somewhere, to be good for you.

9) Paying your taxes.
I know from experience that not paying them on time can cause stress. Since death and taxes are both absolutes, you should choose this one annually in favor of the other. If you need the money to cure a life-threatening disease, leverage your own ability to prioritize.

10) Celebrating success.
While certain forms of celebration, or activities undertaken during celebration, may have adverse health risks, the simple act of acknowledging exceptional behavior or important milestones is an important part of creating positive memories about your life. You can only partake in this activity directly while you are living, so you should think up a reason now.

Unofficial #11 - Creating a top ten list that fits somewhere in the stack of useless internet journalism that is amusing for short periods of time.

Disclaimer: I have no definitive proof of anything nor do I actually believe anything I have ever read in a Top 10 list.

The hidden empire.

2011-05-16T14:31:00.001-07:00

72 slides on how Amazon controls e-commerce. From faberNovel.

Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire

View more presentations from faberNovel

ROX

2011-04-28T04:12:00.001-07:00

Amplify’d from www.adobe.com

ROX: Return on Experience

Thursday, May 5 at 11am Pacific

User experience (UX) plays a significant role in why IT projects fail. UX has a direct impact on the ROI of new IT projects and often unlocks value hidden in existing IT investments. This webinar will help you:

Understand how successful CIOs build a case for UX and its role/investment in your project

Evaluate the skillsets and knowledge required to leverage UX successfully

Prepare to optimize projects over time based on understanding and acting on UX issues

Deliver great experiences that map to both business needs and consumer demands

Support your internal customers with better tools and platforms for consistent multi-channel delivery

Speakers:

Patricia Seybold, CEO of Patricia Seybold Group

Ronni Marshak, EVP of Patricia Seybold Group

Ben Watson, Principal, Customer Experience at Adobe

Register for this webinar and you’ll receive The Seybold Group whitepaper: “Developing Apps for Improved Customer Experience”.
Read more at www.adobe.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/b10pll

Adobe helps found new Customer Experience Professionals Association

2011-04-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

Responding to a greatly increased need for a centralized and interactive community that brings together the growing field of all those who develop, manage, optimize and envision how organizations interact with their customers, the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) launched today with a number of leading companies signed as Founding Corporate Members and Gold, Silver and Bronze Sponsors.

The mission of this new organization is essentially directly in line with where Adobe is going as a company, both in terms of their own customer experience and more importantly, in our enterprise platform mission to deliver outstanding customer experiences for the customers and employees of our customers. Here is the mission of the CXPA:

The Customer Experience Professionals Association is a global, non-profit organization that supports the professional development of its members by enhancing networking, providing research and education, establishing standards, promoting the industry, and creating a better understanding of the discipline of customer experience.

Original post at Adobe helps found new Customer Experience Professionals Association

Disclosure: I was part of putting this in place for Adobe where I work.

Web video powers global innovation

2011-04-17T06:04:00.000-07:00

From Chris Anderson's talk at TEDGlobal 2010.

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation on Prezi

The visual interface is now your brand

2011-04-12T17:47:00.001-07:00

Nick Myers: The Visual Interface is Now Your Brand from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

...and the presentation.

The visual interface is now your brand

View more presentations from Nick Myers

Control music and viz with your heart

2011-04-09T07:09:00.001-07:00

Classically trained musicians control a music composition and a graphical visualization through their personal heartbeats.

Amplify’d from infosthetics.com

Heart Chamber Orchestra [heartchamberorchestra.org] is an audio-visual performance during which 12 classical trained musicians control a music composition and a graphical visualization through their personal heartbeats.

The musical score is generated in real-time by the heartbeats of the musicians, who read and play this score from a computer screen placed in front of them. As a result, the installation forms a feedback loop in which the music literally "comes from the heart". Technically, each musician is equipped with an ECG (electrocardiogram) sensor. A computer monitors and analyzes the state of the 12 hearts in real-time. The acquired information is then used to compose a musical score with the aid of custom-made computer software. While the musicians are playing, their heartbeats influence and change the composition and vice versa. In addition, abstract computer graphic imagery is generated to establish another sensual and narrative layer.

Read more at infosthetics.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/byjlc

Insert Your Card - a user story

2011-04-08T10:19:00.000-07:00

It’s 8:58 PM on a balmy Friday night and the local wine merchant is about to roll down the steel cage door. Why is always at these little Friday night soirees that no one ever brings enough imbibe to keep the silver tongues dancing?

Andrea’s breath leaves a trail of whispered steam that plots her hurried pace to the limited vintage selection down the corner. As she hurries towards the hopeful neon, she contemplates whether uncorking a few screwtops might just elevate the priority of adequate resourcing for the next informal meeting of the minds.

Once in the store, her years of amateur sommelier practice pay off and in no time she hoists her well stocked basket in front of the cashier, proudly presenting a couple hefty Riojas balanced by her favorite wispy Bordeaux, the instantly classic and far too expensive ’82 Lafite. ’83 was just not the same.

$108.49.

Her wallet is already in her hand and she quickly pulls 5 crisp twenties and sets them on the counter as she unsnaps the change compartment…empty. A quick glance at the new girl behind the counter gives no glimmer of recognition and in despair she starts to prioritize Spain over France, lining up the soldiers to choose one to fall first.

The clerk doesn’t skip a beat. Reaching her hand beside the register, she whips out a strange telephone like device and hands it to Andrea. “We take debit.”

“What? Debit?”

Then it hits her. Somewhere in the retsina-accompanied fog of her Friday night glow she remembers the quick scan she took over a pamphlet in the bank scant weeks ago. Diving into the card section of her Ferragamo wallet, she procures the mag-striped novelty that she has just started using to deposit her paycheques and hands it to the clerk.

Swipe.

Tap tap tap.

She takes it back from the clerk and squints at the screen.

ENTER YOUR PIN.

She assesses the clerk’s helpfulness and clips the support request down to, “…same as the bank machine?” As if expecting this, the clerk nods quickly and looks down at the machine.

They stand facing each other, engaged in this strange new transaction as it starts to move ahead quickly.

APPROVE PURCHASE? 108.49

Yes.

CHOOSE ACCOUNT.

Chequing.

THANK YOU.

She hands it back to the clerk and the chatter of the miniature matrix plays a strange harmony to the crinkling of plastic bags encasing the precious guarantee that great friends and good conversation will ensue for a few more hours.

FREEZE.

I single plastic card falls to a well worn counter, the bounces echoing in the eery silence of a wine shop frozen in time.

What just happened?

The world changed in an instant. A cultural and practical change on this level that has such profound implications on how we manage (if you believe that rampant consumerism is a form of managing) our financial systems and status is predicated by only a few significant phenomena, such as banks, money, RRSPs and other instruments of investment and preservation. But lets ponder for a moment the complexity of those instruments and the apparent simplicity of the much more sophisticated system that chattered and tapped and quietly streamed the transaction across the web-i-verse.

Do you take this for granted? Yup.

Should you? Yup.

Why? Recently the topic of walk up UX has been floating in the hallowed XD and enterprise halls at Adobe. The term itself is kind of walk-up, right? I think you instantly grok what it means and why it matters.

And while this mundane and antiquated example of boring old-people technology is well behind us, what is interesting is that it has persisted through generations of PC form factors, mobile phone types, fundamental shifts in network and networked technology and it still works just as good as it did when it launched. Will Square replace it forever? Will the bank and payment machines of the future do away with the bulky terminals and the oft too long wait for a 56K phone line connection to take us screaming into consumer bliss.

What won’t change is that a great user experience that makes sense the first time you experience it, and a value proposition that inspires you to finish the task, will never go out of style. That’s walk-up UX.

In a recent discussion on IXDA, an energetic thread on the user experiences that changed the world popped up and interestingly almost all of them had great walk-up UX. Interac and debit appeared a few times on the list, and more recently in banking the PNC Virtual Wallet was mentioned a few times as well. The other thing that was notable was that many of them had little or no UI such as QR codes, EZPass, DropBox and RFID, while others had much more sophisticated and complex UIs, such as Skype, Traktor, PayPal and ZipCar. This indicates, and should come as no surprise, that the user interface is pretty much an open book in terms of complexity and sophistication and a great user experience ensues either way. But that’ another story.

It was a great party.

Note: I know finding an ’82 Lafite at your local wine shop, especially for that price, is not realistic but it’s an aspirational fairy tale.

Welcome the enterprise app store

2011-04-06T12:25:00.001-07:00

Reinvigorated by Cisco's acquisition of newScale, the enterprise app store is back on the discussion block. Ranging in definition from complete marketplace through adjunct re-markets for mobile apps targeting the enterprise, the enterprise app store seems to be taking hold, at least on the terms of the vendors seeking to exploit the lack of pure focus in mainstream app stores.

This is a watch and learn - as the different approaches are vetted and validated through adoption and developer opportunity. It's going to be hard to pin down the procurement method that works best for extraneous apps and services, especially in Fortune 500+ companies that have rigorous architectural review and acceptance processes.

Clearly it's going this way, but which way exactly feels like an opportunity for further definition and exploration.

(this article is fraught with pop-ups etc so proceed with caution if you're following the link)

Amplify’d from www.wirelessweek.com

Cisco newScale. Cisco will use the acquisition of newScale last week to primarily target enterprises with the ability to build a service catalog and self-service portal for private cloud services. It will be interesting to see the investments Cisco makes and if they’ll be able to successfully add the ability to provision public cloud services through the same portal.

HP Open Cloud Marketplace. HP announced their cloud strategy at HP Summit on March 15^th. A key component of the strategy is an open application marketplace. According to Leo Apotheker, HP “envisions this to be an open cloud marketplace that will offer secure, scalable and trusted enterprise applications and services catalogs.” Built on HP Cloud Service Automation, HP promises to make available both private and public cloud computing resources and applications through the self-service portal.

VMware Project Horizon. Announced at VMWorld 2010, Project Horizon “will broker user access to applications, virtual desktops and data resources, while preserving the required level of security and control needed by the business.” If VMware successfully integrate Tricipher’s identity management software so that users can have single sign-on access to SaaS, mobile apps and native windows applications they’ll really move the ball forward.

Orange Business Services Private Application Store. Orange Business Services markets their offering as catalog of services with project governance for the transition to and building and running of applications on any client device. Orange refers to it as a “Federated Web 2.0 Portal” that enables users to access applications from private clouds, managed private clouds hosted with Orange, or sanctioned public cloud services.

Verizon is not among the vendors listed above but they do offer a self-service customer portal as part of their Computing as a Service (CaaS) offering. Far more interesting is Verizon’s partnership with SAP to deliver SAP from the cloud and integrate SAP applications with Verizon’s Managed Mobility platform. The value of cloud is in delivering applications on demand to any device and the Verizon SAP partnership is a first step in accomplishing that. I have no doubt that Verizon will add an enterprise storefront capability and when they do, they’ll integrate cloud and managed mobility for many more enterprise applications. It demonstrates that the telcos may be best positioned to offer enterprises a cloud storefront that integrates cloud computing and mobility.
Read more at www.wirelessweek.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/by0yo

Morgan Spurlock's brandy brand thing

2011-04-06T12:14:00.001-07:00

Brave manoeuvre here.

Amplify’d from www.ted.com

See more at www.ted.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/by0w3

Learn 5 key principles of #UX

2011-04-01T11:37:00.001-07:00

Interactive experience design expert David Hogue focuses on five key principles of interaction design:

- Consistency
- Visibility
- Learn-ability
- Predictability
- Feedback

Part 1 - Five Essential Principles of Interaction Des...

Part 1 - Five Essential Principles of Interaction DesignUnderstand what interaction design is and how the five essential principals of interaction design could help you make better interaction design decisions. This quick introduction will help you get started thinking about how to design your interfaces in the most effective way with the behavior of the user in mind.Runtime : 00:28:45
Average Rating :
Added : Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Part 2 - Interaction Design & Navigation

Part 2 - Interaction Design & NavigationNow that you understand the five principals of Interaction Design, it’s time to learn how to apply those concepts to craft effective navigational systems for digital interfaces. At the end, follow along a quick tutorial in Adobe Flash Catalyst to see some ways dropdown navigation bar elements can be presented.Runtime : 00:29:06
Average Rating :
Added : Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Part 3 - Interaction Design & Text

Part 3 - Interaction Design & TextSee how the five essential principals of interaction design apply to the presentation and the delivery of text, and understand how people tend to view and consume text on a digital device. Then follow a quick exercise in Adobe Flash Catalyst to take a look at an example of creating a liquid layout.Runtime : 00:27:15
Average Rating :
Added : Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Part 4 - Interaction Design & Images and Media

Part 4 - Interaction Design & Images and MediaIn this episode, David explores how interaction design is applied to the delivery of images and media through the use of patterns, timing, size and more. Then he switches over to Adobe Flash Catalyst to show an example where some of this is applied to a light box project.Runtime : 00:28:34
Average Rating :
Added : Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Part 5 - Interaction Design & Forms and Dialogs

Part 5 - Interaction Design & Forms and DialogsIn this final lesson, David wraps things up by teaching you how to effectively design interactions for forms and dialogs including ways to smoothly guide users through a good user experience using the same essential principals discussed in this series. Runtime : 00:25:36
Average Rating :
Added : Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Watch them all now at tv.adobe.com

UX in a box

2011-04-01T07:14:00.001-07:00

For some time now a cross-section of business, research and technology teams have been working on a way to get great UX into a box with one primary goal - that it can be effectively un-boxed and put to work. A variety of different approaches were taken and in the end we settled on one workable option, but first let's explore the outputs of the lengthy and expensive consulting and brainstorm process:

Put the actual designers in a box and ship them. This proved inhumane and not a good use of designer's time while they waited in the box.
Put a lot of different designs in a box. This was tried by Corel and others in the clip-art heyday. No further comment on this.
Put a DIY design kit in the box. The problem with this approach, while it could be construed to provide actual value, was that the outcome was still unpredictable.
Capture color, process, ideas, requirements and user needs and put those in the box and pray. This has been tried in variations by a lot of folks already and unfortunately produces inconsistent results.

Finally, this guarantees that the initial investment will pay out for years to come as organizations constantly improve on the UX based on changing user requirements and evolving form factors and interaction models.

Unfortunately, we are currently stuck on pricing - we know it is somewhere between free and priceless and the business and marketing teams are polarized on this issue now.

As soon as we resolve this, we will have more information. If you would like to participate in a pre-release program, grab a pencil, a napkin, a few user profiles and a design buddy and head down to the pub for an April Fools Friday cocktail and some of that tomorrow's soup you love so much.

As part of our ongoing research to see if there are better approaches, the plan is to capture and document the next 30 days of UX discussion around the web and mine, visualize, share, thread and thematically digest the current UX conversation. Please participate by continuing to talk about UX and if you like join the conversation directly by using the hashtag #30DaysofUX (#UX is a perfectly fine alternative of course). We are not trying to co-opt the conversation and we know it goes beyond 30 days, but this is an opportunity to capture, mine and better understand it - who is driving it, what the current themes are and where the conversation is going. Our thesis is that it's going outside the box. More to come...

Posted via email from bitpakkit

UX in a box

2011-04-01T06:08:00.000-07:00

For some time now a cross-section of business, research and technology teams have been working on a way to get great UX into a box with one primary goal - that it can be effectively un-boxed and put to work.

A variety of different approaches were taken and in the end we settled on one workable option, but first let's explore the outputs of the lengthy and expensive consulting and brainstorm process:

Put the actual designers in a box and ship them. This proved inhumane and not a good use of designer's time while they waited in the box.
Put a lot of different designs in a box. This was tried by Corel and others in the clip-art heyday. No further comment on this.
Put a DIY design kit in the box. The problem with this approach, while it could be construed to provide actual value, was that the outcome was still unpredictable.
Capture color, process, ideas, requirements and user needs and put those in the box and pray. This has been tried in variations by a lot of folks already and unfortunately produces inconsistent results.

In the end, we decided to put design-thinking DNA in the box and to make sure that there was enough to go around. Through direct injection and osmosis, firms can leverage this DNA across multiple projects forever. In addition to providing a steady stream of maintenance and support revenues, this also accomplishes the much-needed requirement for teams to fundamentally rethink how they enable self-serve and customer service touchpoints through great design. Finally, this guarantees that the initial investment will pay out for years to come as organizations constantly improve on the UX based on changing user requirements and evolving form factors and interaction models.

Unfortunately, we are currently stuck on pricing - we know it is somewhere between free and priceless and the business and marketing teams are polarized on this issue now. As soon as we resolve this, we will have more information.

If you would like to participate in a pre-release program, grab a pencil, a napkin, a few user profiles and a design buddy and head down to the pub for an April Fools Friday cocktail and some of that tomorrow's soup you love so much.

As part of our ongoing research to see if there are better approaches, the plan is to capture and document the next 30 days of UX discussion around the web and mine, visualize, share, thread and thematically digest the current UX conversation. Please participate by continuing to talk about UX and if you like join the conversation directly by using the hashtag #30DaysofUX (#UX is a perfectly fine alternative of course). We are not trying to co-opt the conversation and we know it goes beyond 30 days, but this is an opportunity to capture, mine and better understand it - who is driving it, what the current themes are and where the conversation is going. Our thesis is that it's going outside the box. More to come...

Shiny customer experience from Aus. bank

2011-03-30T07:06:00.001-07:00

Kind of like the Genius bar of banks, this bank has stepped up the digital experience in person. Great way to get customers across the chasm in a way that is comfortable and appropriately engaging. The obvious investment in branch design definitely ups the game in terms of overall customer experience and its implications for bank branding.

Amplify’d from www.digitaldesignstrategy.net

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia opened a high tech bank in Brisbane that combines iPads, iMacs, Asus Touchscreens, a coffee bar, and traditional bank services in a well thought out and carefully designed user experience. Patrons have the option of using multichannel technology to complete banking activities in the most efficient means possible.

As soon as customers walk in the bank, they see a row of iMacs waiting to be used for banking services. A concierge greets them, and helps them figure out the fastest way to achieve their banking goals, i.e. using one of the iMacs, iPads, and Windows Touchscreens, or speaking with a bank associate. They can complete many typical banking activities, such as open accounts, check balances, transfer funds and pay bills online at the iMac terminals, and staff members hover nearby in case they have questions or issues. They also teach customers how to use the new online options available from CBA in order to get faster results. On any given day, 50-plus staff are on-hand to help out. I guess this works a lot like airport kiosks, which are self serve, but which always have attendants nearby to help out in case there is an issue.

The teller is in the back of the branch, so that customers feel more comfortable trying out the technology before making their way to the human service organization.

See more at www.digitaldesignstrategy.net

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bx4ik

Dream rangers...bank ad by Ogilvy Taiwan

2011-03-24T16:45:00.001-07:00

Created by Ogilvy Taiwan

Creative Director: Jennifer Hu

Copywriter: Jennifer Hu, Justin Chia

Art director: Leah Chen

Producer: Abby Ku

Director: Thanonchai

Amplify’d from www.youtube.com

See more at www.youtube.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bwhvb

10 things you can learn from musicians

2011-03-24T06:57:00.001-07:00

Mike over at Crowdspring builds on his things you can learn from kids and things you can learn from dogs posts with a thoughtful posts on what musicians do right. Being a musician I was really taken by this post because I tend to completely separate my 'music life' from my 'day job'. After reading this I am thinking that a little more blurring of the lines and a lot more keeping of the beat is a good thing...

Amplify’d from blog.crowdspring.com

1. Musicians cooperate.

As with all great teams, great musicians have to work together seamlessly and in cooperation. Choosing the proper key, playing at the same tempo, and selecting the proper instrumentation, pitch, and levels are all a given to any group of musicians. Entrepreneurs can learn a great deal about teamwork from this example and businesses must be able to work in much the same way; teams of people functioning in unison to achieve a goal or create a meaningful product or service.

2. Musicians keep a beat.

Teams need drive and incentive to work effectively and entrepreneurs can use the example set by musicians to help their team be more effective. One way to apply the musical metaphor is to imagine the rhythm that drives a song and think of a project or effort as having a similar underlying rhythm which moves it forward. Establish a beat to the team’s work, maintain that beat, and use it to accomplish the goal you;’ve set.

3. The orchestra follows the conductor.

In a large ensemble or even a small group there is one person who establishes and maintains the rhythm, drives the emphasis, and controls the tone of the piece being played. In a rock band this is often the drummer or other percussionist and in an orchestra it is the conductor. In business there also is a need for an effective leader who provides much the same function – driving the team, establishing the priorities, and clearly articulating goals, strategy, and tactics. A baton is optional.

4. Musicians play with joy (or something else).

Musicians are motivated by their innate love for the music itself and the joy of making it. Great entrepreneurs are much the same – driven by their dedication, motivated by the sheer fun of the work, and hooked on the sheer exhilaration of creating something unique.

5. Musicians listen to one another.

Musicians have to be able to hear what their bandmates are doing in order to adjust their own performance based on what they are hearing. Entrepreneurs can learn to pay greater attention to their team – listening, responding, and adjusting are all key elements of the collaborative process and strong teams constantly respond and adjust based on what other members are doing at any given time.

6. Musicians are weird.

While every rock band, in particular, has it’s own identity as a band, they are also made up of individuals with their own priorities, unique characteristics, prerogatives, and idiosyncrasies. Great bands celebrate each member’s individualism, and at same time identify as members of the group. Great entrepreneurs also must create an environment that allows people to flourish as individuals and at the same time maintain deep connections to the company and the team.

7. Musicians try different things.

The greatest band often overcome barriers that keep them from getting their music in front of an audience. Artists are constantly being rejected and the strongest among them respond by trying something different or simply just keeping at it. Many bands labor for years before landing that first recording contract or that breakthrough tour. Great entrepreneurs have to exhibit the same level of perseverance to get that business off the ground or to try another when the first one fails. There is a reason that we hear the term “serial” entrepreneur so often – the tenacity to keep at it is as much a part of a good entrepreneur as their ability t raise capital and manage projects.

8. Individual notes are just that.

In a complex piece of music (as in a complex ventrue) mall components add up to a greater whole. In music it is the individual notes and the individual players. In entrepreneurism it is the individual components of a business as well as the individual people involved. Great entrepreneurs recognize that their venture, like a great symphony, should be greater than the sum of its parts and that, on their own, those parts are just components of the whole.

9. Great music establishes an emotional connection.

When musicians are playing a song or piece they often have their eyes closed, trancelike, under the music’s spell. This emotional connection to their work infuses it with passion, energy, and significance. In the world of entrepreneurism and startups it should be the same for you and your team. Without personal investment, commitment, and dedication te venture can not succeed; when a business breaks through everyone should be yelling with joy, when it fails we should all have tears streaming.

10. Musicians love to party.

Never overlook the importance of a party! Rock musicians are famous (notorious) for their ability to cut loose and revel wildly and so too should entrepreneurs. Celebrate wins wherever they occur, take the team out for a drink, bring in a special meal, hire a magician to put on a private show! Always be ready to whoop it up! Just don’t trash hotel rooms doing it.
Read more at blog.crowdspring.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bwfg4

The cure for writer's block - get some backup.

2011-03-11T09:43:00.001-08:00

Typewriter soundplay brought to you by Funny Jokes

Posted via email from bitpakkit

The satisfaction/loyalty disconnect #cem

2011-03-06T10:06:00.001-08:00

Irving Stackpole uses the example of considering a seniors' community to explore the different factors affecting loyalty and satisfaction. There is growing realization and acceptance that these two traditionally connected themes may be correlary but are still exclusive.

Amplify’d from www.stackpoleassociates.com

There is a frightening disconnect between measured satisfaction
and customer loyalty. For many years, senior living managers have
performed customer satisfaction surveys to measure how happy various
customers and consumers are with their communities. These surveys
have taken many forms, but the results have been remarkably similar
- customers and consumers seem quite satisfied, or happy. Another
fact, however, is that satisfied customers are not predictably loyal
- too often they walk away to another senior living community. Why?
And if happy customers walk away, why bother trying to find out
if they're happy in the first place?

Three theories may explain this situation:

Customers of high vulnerability services (such as senior housing)
don't tell the truth about their level of satisfaction;

Satisfaction and loyalty are not correlated in the markets for
these services;

Service dissatisfaction is not the only reason for disloyalty.

There is good evidence that each of these provide at least part
of the explanation, and can be helpful in guiding what to measure
and how.

Regarding surveyed persons telling the truth, little can be done,
although there is some evidence that having an outside person, vendor
or agency perform the measurement is useful. Surveyors often must
work harder to obtain negative responses through one-on-one interviews,
for example. What is clear, however, is that the survey respondents
who provide negative responses are offering the surveyor precious
information. It is my experience that negative responses are too
frequently either dismissed with a roll of the eyes, or rationalized
away to the margins. It is human nature to take pride in, and therefore
be defensive about, our work, but this human quality does not serve
the management of senior living communities in this circumstance.

The relative importance placed on features and price change with
time. Of importance to measure, therefore, on a regular basis, are
the relative satisfaction with, and the perceived value of, a communities'
services. How can we do this?

Shoppers for, and consumers of, high vulnerability services evaluate
these services in a highly comparative manner. Perceived satisfaction
alone does not predict buying behavior or loyalty. By asking shoppers
and customers to make comparisons of competitive positions in both
service areas and price, it is possible to create a far more useful
and predictive model.

Read more at www.stackpoleassociates.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bt6va

The pencil, the pen and #UX wireframes

2011-03-05T09:49:00.001-08:00

Great examples of different styles of sketches from a bunch of reasonably famous projects - interesting to note the differing levels of detail and also the similarities to the actual final projects.

More and more after the jump...

Amplify’d from inspirationfeed.com

5 Years of Firefox

iPad app sketch

Viget Labs Wireframes

Early Ember Sketches

OnlyJames Wireframe Sketch of Article Detail

CommLogix Wireframe

Early BusinessWeek.com Design Sketch

Website UI Sketch

UI Flow Sketch

Dew Tour Wireframes

HBO SATC UI wireframe

Web Sketch Interface v2 – Graffletopia

Sqetch

Verify Home Screen

See more at inspirationfeed.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bt0ii

Nielsen visualizes the smartphone market

2011-03-04T04:12:00.001-08:00

Original post - TechSpot - http://www.techspot.com/news/42674-android-first-in-us-market-share-apple-rim-tied-for-second.html

Nielsen has posed the question "Who is winning the US smartphone battle?" and has answered it in two ways. Then the company put it all into a nice chart to help you understand, which you can see below.

The first answer is Google's Android, if we're looking at smartphone OS market share. The second is Apple's iPhone tied with Research in Motion's BlackBerry, if we're looking at smartphone manufacturer market share.

Let's look more closely at the numbers. Android has 29 percent share (broken down into 12 percent for HTC, 10 percent for Motorola, 5 percent for Samsung, and 2 percent for Other). Both iPhone and Blackberry have 27 percent. Microsoft, HP, and Symbian are not a threat, yet.

(If anyone knows of a higher res source for the image that is not a content farm, please share)

10 things users don't know about UX (and where to find them).

2011-02-27T10:18:00.000-08:00

UX is trendy. UX is topical.

Let’s gather a little background on UX growth and the exploding trend using some readily available corollaries - free internet statistics. First lets look at Google Trends to understand the overall use of user experience in stories and articles and how that corresponds to growth in search terms and use.

Growth exploded in the latter half of 2010 and there are already exponential indicators for 2011.

Now let’s take a look at the jobs market as it relates to the need for user experience, as found in job descriptions being posted on the internet.

Nearly 5% of all jobs posted mention user experience.

Finally let’s take a look at one of the web-based communities and UX associations to see how the trends are unfolding there. IxDA now has over 24,000 members and there are currently more than 1,000 UX jobs posted on their job boards.

Job postings for UX on IXDA have grown to the point where members
demanded a separate forum for them and IXDA is effectively
monetizing the trend with 90-day ad placements..

Why is UX trending up?
The short answer here is because it's expensive to launch products and services that fail. And that failure is becoming more commonplace when user demands for social interaction, simplicity and intuitive use are not met. There is naturally going to be a certain amount of hype generated by pent up demand to raise a collective toast to great experiences. This same trend emerges in the way we share Superbowl ads and talk about good brand advertising or add our voice to recommendations for restaurants or books online. It is not hype for a user to expect a great experience. It is not hype when business leaders build pragmatic cases to understand ROI prior to heavier upfront investments in technology projects. It is not hype when former design snobs open the door to collaboration and discussion as broader team members. The link in the previous sentence takes you to a recent article in UXMag that pointed to an interesting opportunity that exists in the UX practice now to properly align to the broader impetus around customer experience and to formalize how the practices interlock. When we peel back this onion, what we do find is that there are some more thoughtful leaders trying to level-set expectations on what it means to be user-centric.

There is a shared expectation in place today that an investment in user experience will result in the following areas of research and discipline being applied against a project. There may be some unresolved issues in certain project types relative to upfront investment amounts but at minimum we need to synthesize user knowledge into usable design and measure the usage in order to understand adoption.

User research – appropriate definition of target and impacted users and their frustrations, desires, needs and goals with both current and desire state.
Personas and use cases – the amalgamation of the audience types identified in the research constrained into usable, useful, coherent identities that can be used to map features, prioritization and scenarios to situations.
Design and design thinking – the use of design to drive iteration in the project and to clarify outcomes to all stakeholders, as well as final form factor for the deliverables.
Optimization – learning from behavior, usability testing, A/B design and offer testing and other data inputs and outputs that support the design thesis and inform successful adoption and satisfaction.

The question is, where else do we need to look in order to truly understand the delivery of a great experience. What other resources and inputs provide an equally pragmatic POV to users when properly engaged? Where can we draw on information that lends itself to inspiration?

A recent Gizmodo post featured a somewhat familiar video under the headline, “In Praise Of The People Who Make Gadgets Worth Using”. From a first mile (outside-in way of saying ‘last mile’) perspective, UX professionals may in fact be responsible for the ‘joy of using’ part, but the ‘worth’ part comes from a lot of disciplines and a lot of contributors to the overall promise being made by a brand which has embraced the provision of a category-leading digital experience.

But there are at least 10 more contributing, pragmatic, non-user inputs that support the story being told and ultimately inform decisions that need to be made. In fact, one could argue that these are just as critical to the success of any project built with the user in mind, since the conversation and actions that are being undertaken are critical to many areas of the business that go well beyond the success of the project or application being built.

Marketing – the role of the experience is generally going to be inclusive of offers and programs that are part of how the brand markets itself. Beyond brand impressions, this is often the primary intended action as either acquisition or loyalty unless the product is an online service itself.
The business goal – tension between user goals and business goals is ratified to common ground in order to meet the unique needs of both participants in an experience. Beyond the user needs for the service or product itself, this may add unique needs for social interaction, service dialogue or transaction capabilities in the delivery of the interfaces provided.
The competition – what others in the field are doing. It’s important when we look at competition that we look at anything and everything that is competing for attention, not just direct competition. For example, when people are thinking about investing, they are not only thinking about investment banking. Look at all the areas people invest in and see what is currently capturing passion, mindshare and the attention of your desired constituent.
What users already like and use – what people know about and do already is often the inverse of the above, especially in the case of a new product or way of delivering service. By understanding the why and what of where your target audience is spending their time, you can better inform the decisions you need to make. This, like some of the other areas, may be covered by user research but too often this is narrowly focused on ‘what they use that you provide.' Motivational design and game theory may both apply here, but the point is not so much the design as the business and market trends that support decisions that you will make.
The glass – We use the glass as a metaphor for the device or system that user will consume the experience on, and to capture and relate the constraints and affordances of the target environment. How can effectively persist context, history, profile and preference across multiple devices and screens? How do you prioritize the most common and lead into the next wave effectively? This is not so much a question of screen size and pixel depth as it is a question of task and context.
The platform – the complexity of back-end systems, their limited capabilities for great experience and business processes that they are built to support are at least in part why you are here. The bad news is that you can’t ignore them. The good news is that you can make them better. A good metaphor for this was discussed recently on Twitter - that experiences are akin to the razor market. UX (design) and the associated experiences are disposable – used temporarily, rapidly dulling and constantly changing. This is how digital agencies make money and how Adobe makes tools revenue in the category. UX (experience) and the associated systems and processes are more permanent - these are constraints and enablers and require the right adapter/configuration in order to use the design. As an example, it is this the sum of these parts make up the enterprise UX business as it relates to Adobe's focus on customer experience management.
The domain – domain-driven design actually surfaced as a technology approach to enabling better user experiences during the industry’s learning years. While it does not solve everything, what we do know is that the inference of domain is critical, and that the informed separation of domain from service and interface requires that you represent domain effectively. Some platform and tools providers infer this as a pattern and best practice. IT teams have deep knowledge of the domain model and its association to underlying systems and should be the core contributor to this knowledge. The consumerization of IT may lend itself to some rethinking of domain models, but that does not mean they are gone.
Data – data is the interface and data absolutely informs the interface. Historical, competitive, industry, market, geography, audience and technology trends are all surfaced as data that can be used along with your own analytics to drive broader insight about the conditions your new design will exist within. Embrace it, live with it, learn from it, and consume it continuously, especially after launch. Then share it with everyone who is a stakeholder in order to maximize learning and inputs into the final form factor.
The world around you – Close your laptop lid and go for a walk. Visit a gallery. Attend a wellness conference. See a movie. What are people doing, reading, studying, watching, visiting and talking about? What commonalities in these shared experiences can you extrapolate to your audience and desired outcomes? What persistent affordances cross over into your world in a way that will both inform and prepare your customers for your leg of the journey?
The designer's body of work – You are, or have hired, some brilliant designers. These brilliant designers are focused on transforming digital experiences based on two key inputs – everything you know or can learn about the project AND who they are and their past experience and knowledge. Today’s UX designers understand layout, color, brand, interaction, information architecture and even the constraints of development. Armed with these tools, their magic is going to play a big part in finding the right path, and we can benefit from some pure, unfettered ideation that borrows on the wealth of education and experience that is hiding in their portfolio. What we do know is that designers all appreciate great UX and that users increasingly appreciate the source of great experience.

This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list – nor does the list preclude that users or user experience professionals will often have knowledge of some of the workings in specific areas - the intent was to both push a little on the realities behind UX trend that favor design and usability in order to inform the overall discovery of requirements.

If I had one question of readers, it would be where do you find your inspiration and logic outside of the design process? Or, perhaps when is user-centric too user-centric?

User-centric: how much is too much?

2011-02-14T15:33:00.000-08:00

This is part of an enterprise UX and architecture whitepaper that a few folks at Adobe have been working on for release soon. This particular part has been removed from that paper in the 'edit' process. I share here because I feel it is worth sharing and since I claim some part of the credit for this along with Craig Randall, Marcel Boucher, Rob Pinkerton and others.

Consumers need or expect a compelling experience across devices, channels and, in some cases, on and off-line. Design and experiential symphony are the new competitive battleground in modern commerce. For business managers, this represents a new method for acquiring customers...or a threat if they lose customers to competitors providing a better experience. The company who provides the best sales or service experience will grow.

Today, most user interface re-design efforts amount to applying lipstick on a pig. This is because it is either a pure design function (aesthetics) or because it is left to developers and technical teams to ‘skin’ the application based on data or functional requirements. There are important differences between UI (user interface) and UX (user experience). UI is about chrome (frosting); UX is about interaction (cake). Better together, the properly layered and frosted cake symbolizes both the unique innovation and the repeatable approach to delivering sweet experiences.

Efforts to link existing systems to provide comprehensive data integration are valuable, but have less to do with customer experience on the front end than with transactional automation on the back end. Such strategies may prove useful for improving customer service through existing systems but even then you might consider integrating information where it is used, in and by the client application or browser. User-centric technologies are designed to induce customer participation from an evolving consumer who wants to modify, create, and respond to product and service offerings in-context and at non-traditional intersections in the customer communications model. Businesses that can reach these customers through experience will grow their customer base and increase revenue opportunity. Unforgiving users will create new business opportunities as well. Customers disappointed with experience will seek new firms for their business.

Performance and blended environments
Personal computing environments are outperforming workplace computing environments. Employees and consumers mix and match their own blended IT environments to optimize performance - and challenge the traditional role of IT. To the business manager, this represents an opportunity to harness employee productivity outside the traditional workplace environment and to reach customers through new touch points. User-centric computing enables telecommuting, personalized workspaces and hour access for employees allowing them to work the way they want to work and increases productivity, loyalty and contribution. To access the participatory customer, there are new opportunities to communicate online, offline, on mobile, and securely through traditionally unsecured channels. Such access provides opportunities for constant contextual analysis and delivery of services based on improved customer insight.

User-centric computing can turn amateurs into professionals, consumers into prosumers, enabling deeper participation and ownership of interfaces and how people use them. Customer participants should be nurtured as human capital as well since they will invest in developing, improving and evangelizing products and services. User-centric technologies provide the tools and access to the machinery of innovation - content, context, communication, collaboration. Employees can design business processes to meet changing market conditions. Customers can design products to meet their specific needs and this dynamic intelligence can be aggregated to unearth new business opportunities.

Opening up traditional business process boundaries provides new opportunities for customer contact and regulatory compliance: User-centric technologies create a complete paradigm shift as they perforate the traditional enterprise border. Business process automation and information security are typically constrained by a network, a machine or a disk. The companies who extend their business outside the traditional enterprise border will generate new business opportunities and can reduce the burden of regulatory compliance.

These boundaries are challenged by new technology delivery models such as SaaS and pervasive client infrastructure such as PDF, Flash, HTML. These new delivery models promise opportunities to delivery superior service with less cost, reach large audiences for compliance without systematic burden and communicate rich, personal information with complete security. Over time I have adopted a refined approach for measuring categorical leadership across three core capabilities that should be inherent in your design thinking and application delivery strategy:

• Reach – you will want your applications to reach the most customers in the most contexts possible with the least amount of effort to provide for these various contexts; e.g. browser, application, mobile

• Experience – You must leverage best practices in experience to deliver on three key opportunities to excel; during customer acquisition or the first touch point, during any interaction dealing with customer service throughout the life of the customer, and enhancing our communications both personal and mass inclusive of all documents and ongoing outbound touch points to provide new levels of interactivity and response

• Optimization – Tireless improvement and betterment as part of a measured approach to bringing these great experiences, enabling us to manage highly responsive environments, constantly optimized both physically and from a content and delivery perspective.

These three core capabilities empower your opportunity to deliver this new breed of applications: high touch, collaborative, everywhere and instilled with a constantly improving and agile sensibility. Further we see an increase in applications built by enterprises to service their customers, leveraging web and enterprise technologies to optimize outcomes by focusing on defining factors that invoke push/pull relationships between systems and users, leveraging dynamic content, rich data visualization and capture and finally social interactions to increase engagement.

Much of your time as an architect is concerned with how to sensibly partition an application into a set of inter-related modules or at minimum recognizable "chunks" of software. Software systems are designed according to human motivations and desires, and any reasonable architecture process should not remove the human element from the architectural design process. Essentially a focus on users both from the perspective of knowledge and environment as well as goals and activities is the best combination, since a pedagogical focus on what users want infers too broad of a set of cases, and conversely a pure focus on activity will not produce the desired results from a user input perspective.

Customer Experience Show - Episode 45

2011-02-06T11:36:00.001-08:00

Chatting about the various customer experience initiatives I am involved in...

Listen to internet radio with Customer Experience on Blog Talk Radio

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/aoyzg

The ROI of UX

2011-02-04T07:54:00.001-08:00

I spend a lot of time defending the ROI of user experience. From a macro perspective we work in an industry that spends around $1 trillion a year on custom software projects and applications. Roughly 15% of those projects fail even when they are undertaken using an agile methodology, for a variety of reasons including (culled from other posts and experience):

An unreliable team
Weak leaders
Poor stakeholder communication
Reqs and specs are incomplete or too abstract
Focused on success/outcome instead of learning
Retrospects are not implemented
Team members and stakeholders are not properly engaged
Lack of best practices in any of the disciplines
Lack of metrics to measure outcomes against
Inefficient use of time
Scope creep
Not having the right experts at the right time.

UX and design thinking plays a fundamental role in correcting many of the above behaviors and patterns. It starts with playing a role in helping to define a project and its outcomes, shapes the delivery of the actual parts of the technology in terms of who does or uses what and finally gives us measurable improvements in terms of adoption, training and other aspects that are fundamental to the final drop.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk of Human Factors International postulates the 3 of the top reasons that all projects fail are directly tied to UX, and breaks it down in plain language and pictures in the video below, pointing to measured ROI which we can extrapolate into 8 high value categories as follows:

opportunity cost or loss resulting from unintended behaviors
sub-optimal conversion rates
abandoned registration due to complexity or reg-wall
reducing support costs associated with complex interfaces or processes
decreased training costs for new application rollout
more use resulting in repeat customers and process optimization
less development time (impact to bottom line)

http://www.humanfactors.com/ROIposter... - Download a PDF poster of the ROI of User Experience animation featured in this video.

About Dr. Susan Weinschenk:
Dr. Susan Weinschenk has over 30 years experience as a consultant worldwide and is Chief of UX Strategy, Americas at Human Factors International. Her areas of expertise include persuasive interface design, neuropsychology, user centered design, and generational differences.
Dr. Weinschenk has a Ph.D. in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University. Susan has published 4 books on user experience. Her most recent book, Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?, published by New Riders, is in its second printing.

Tesco app lets you order direct from your phone

2011-02-04T07:29:00.001-08:00

Great affordance in terms of a user experience that works by using what you know to do what you need to do.

Grab the Android version using the QR below:

Have you banked on Facebook yet?

2011-02-03T16:19:00.000-08:00

No, this is not an article about Goldman Sachs. In September 2010, ASB Bank opened a virtual branch on Facebook under the leadership of Anna Curzon, General Manager Internet Banking.

Pop into the branch on Facebook (no install req'd)
Note that they post their hours on the door.

At a recent meeting in Stockholm with a leading Swedish bank, the discussion around banking on Facebook came up and this example was discussed at a positive sign for bringing real value to engagement through external conversation platforms.

I was thinking about this when I posted on the Adobe Enterprise blog about the Razorfish report on consumers not wanting to engage with brands on Facebook and Twitter. This type of engagement could be an exception since it essentially intends to inject the right amount of service into the experience.

To date there has been no statistical data reported but I expect it will be forthcoming.

Consumers don't see Facebook and Twitter as brand engagement platforms - 'Liminal' from @razorfish

2011-02-03T05:11:00.001-08:00

Brands on the other hand are flocking to these platforms often in experimental outreach programs and in other cases in concerted and (somewhat) organized efforts that span brands, employees, agencies and more.

My take on this is that social media engagement itself has to have a reason - it's not just the engagement but the reason for engagement. Is it about helping your customers learn more about your products and services? Is it another outpost for customer service? Are these things that consumers are going to feel comfortable sharing publicly?

Our team has spent a lot of time thinking about this - about SocialCRM, about using social in our own efforts and about which of those efforts is productive. I am fortunate to work for a company that is embracing this and willing to try new things and organize effort around activities that make sense to have a social component. For me the reality is that these are only part of the story because even if we were to randomly get lucky in the social space and get to everyone that is 'following' us we would still have to work through a multitude of other engagement points and channels. This is also true of our customers and partners.

The best approach is going to be to get this integrated into the other things that you do. Treating it as an experiment or side project makes it even harder to integrate down the road. Accept that we live in a multi-channel world and a multi-screen universe and that each one has strengths and weaknesses, but more importantly that each one needs to be able to 'see' the other.

I am no psychologist but I suspect that there is something else at play as well. Social media is social and we don't hang out with faceless friends. If we did hang out with faceless friends we would feel very awkward engaging with them on a regular basis. But I'll let the PHd-types sort that one out.

Now the study / article from Razorfish and MediaPost.

(I have noted that Razorfish attributes the management of it's Twitter account to real people that you can also engage with)

Amplify’d from www.mediapost.com

While marketers have flocked to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, consumers still don't view them as important ways to engage with a brand, since they don't meet their expectations. Most people still prefer to connect with brands through more traditional methods, such as email, company Web sites or word-of-mouth.

That's among the key findings from a new report from Razorfish titled "Liminal", based on its own primary research, customer data from a study for Virgin America and social network data compiled by online tracking company Rapleaf on 100,000 consumers. The goal was to look at customer-relationship management more from a consumer's standpoint than a marketer's to understand how people choose to interact with brands.

Across the board, consumers cited "feeling valued" as the most important element of brand engagement. "This demonstrates that both the hipster who DMs a company on Twitter and a boomer who sends a letter in the mail both ultimately want the same thing. Thus, companies should worry less about building out numerous channels and touchpoints and more about ensuring each customer interaction communicates value," advised Razorfish.
Read more at www.mediapost.com

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ILUVUXDESIGN

2011-01-31T04:40:00.001-08:00

ILUVUXDESIGN from lyle on Vimeo.

Who doesn't love a good UX design, and who doesn't get totally frustrated with bad experience design. Hail to all the great UX designers of the world. Spread the love for UX design !!!

Posted via email from bitpakkit

Sales enablement is clearly a key function in building great customer experiences

2011-01-24T10:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.forrester.com/salesperformance - Registration Required

Forrester's Dean Davison and Bradford Holmes recently did a great webinar on sales enablement. There are some great insights that tie really well into how can think about customer experience management and the role sales plays in getting this right.

Clearly the role of technology vendors is changing as we face margin erosion, increased competition and commoditization forces at the same time as we are challenged to grow the business. And in IT we have an opposing set of forces that add to this complexity with things like changing business models driving new business demand, cost pressures and more options than ever - all the time serving a business that is likely focused on delivering a best in class customer and employee experience.

What makes a vendor strategic?
What makes a meeting valuable?
How prepared are you?
Does your value proposition need a tune-up?

This particular presentation really hits home with me - it not only impacts how I do my job but it also has a clear bearing on how our customers are thinking about these same problems and issues today. The salesforce of any organization is a critical customer touchpoint. What are we doing to properly enable them, help them be effective, and ensure that we are doing the right thing for our customers?

Hopefully you find it of value and I welcome any discussion on the subject.

Register to view the slides and listen to the talk at http://www.forrester.com/salesperformance - Registration Required

25 unusual interview questions that do have a right answer...

2011-01-08T11:50:00.001-08:00

Might be fun to post these all on Quora...

Amplify’d from www.bnet.com

Think you’re prepared for your next interview? Well, if you can answer these, you probably are:

If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?

How many ridges are there around a quarter? (Reportedly from Deloitte)

What is the philosophy of martial arts? (A spokesperson for Aflac, where this question was used, says she hopes the candidate quoted Kwai Chang Caine from the 1970s TV show Kung Fu: “I seek not to know the answers, but to understand the questions.”)

Explain to me what has happened in this country during the last 10 years (Reportedly from Boston Consulting)

Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 how weird you are (Reportedly from Capital One)

How many basketballs can you fit in this room? (Reportedly from Google)

Out of 25 horses, pick the fastest 3 horses. In each race, only 5 horses can run at the same time. What is the minimum number of races required? (Reportedly from Bloomberg LP)

If you could be any superhero, who would it be? (Reportedly from AT&T)

You have a birthday cake and have exactly three slices to cut it into eight equal pieces. How do you do it? (Reportedly from Blackrock Portfolio Management)

Given the numbers 1 to 1000, what is the minimum number of guesses needed to find a specific number if you are given the hint “higher” or “lower” for each guess you make? (Reportedly from Facebook)

If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner? (Reportedly from Amazon)

An apple costs 20 cents, an orange costs 40 cents, and a grapefruit costs 60 cents. How much is a pear? (Reportedly from Epic Systems)

There are three boxes. One contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled such that no label identifies the actual contents of its box. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly? (Reportedly from Apple)

How many traffic lights are in Manhattan? (Reportedly from Argus Information and Advisory Services)

You are in a dark room with no light. You have 19 grey socks and 25 black socks. What are the chances you will get a matching pair? (Reportedly from Convergex)

What do wood and alcohol have in common? (Reportedly from Guardsmark)

How do you weigh an elephant without using a weigh machine? (Reportedly from IBM)

You have 8 pennies. Seven weigh the same, but one weighs less. You also have a judges scale. Find the penny that weighs less in three steps. (Reportedly from Intel)

Why do you think only a small portion of the population makes over $150,000? (Reportedly from New York Life)

You are in charge of 20 people. Organize them to figure out how many bicycles were sold in your area last year. (Reportedly from Schlumberger)

How many bottles of beer are [consumed] in the city [in a] week? (Reportedly from Nielsen)

What’s the square root of 2000? (Reportedly from UBS)

A train leaves San Antonio for Houston at 60 mph. Another train leaves Houson for San Antonio at 80 mph. Houston and San Antonio are 300 miles apart. If a bird leaves San Antonio at 100 mph, and turns around and flies back once it reaches the Houston train, and continues to fly between the two, how far will it have flown when they collide? (Reportedly from USAA)

How are M&Ms made? (Reportedly from USBank)

What would you do if you just inherited a pizzeria from your uncle? (This question comes from Volkswagen. A spokeswoman for the company tells BNET while the question is certainly not standard, the company’s business analysts often have to take over and manage projects started by other people, so this question may have been a manager’s attempt to see how a job candidate would run a project they ‘inherited.’)
Read more at www.bnet.com

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Forrester, Varolii, Sitel, Portrait and 50 or so others weigh in on key customer experience trends for 2011.

2011-01-07T14:26:00.001-08:00

Great collection of predictions curated by Peppers & Rogers on key trends that will alter the customer strategy landscape this year. They queried on which customer strategy trend would make the biggest impact in 2011 in four specific areas: customer service, mobile, multichannel marketing, social media, and voice of the customer.

Amplify’d from www.1to1media.com

"We will see a growing number of e-businesses contacting customers through social networks to proactively detect and resolve customer service issues. We have [already] seen some leading companies achieve service and brand success with online support communities. These companies tested the waters and we can expect to see a growing number of companies jump in during the next year, so look for an increase in peer-to-peer support." – Diane Clarkson, Analyst Serving eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals, Forrester Research

"I see 2011 as the year of mobility and immediacy. No matter what channel a customer wishes to communicate across—whether it be email, SMS, voice, social, chat, or a smoke signal—companies must be ready to support these multiple and mobile channels with the service levels expected by consumers today…and be personalized. Companies must know their customers and understand how to communicate with them in a way that is beneficial and meaningful to both parties." -- Mary Cook, Director of Contact Center Solutions, Varolii

"As companies are all trying to figure out what to do with social media and how to capture its power, the call center will be well positioned in 2011 to help them with three fundamental things that we've all become accustomed to: listening to customers, monitoring the conversation around the company, and taking the next step to engage customers in an intelligent way…. Social Media is like word of mouth on steroids. Ignored or wrongly handled, and a consumer's opinions online can whizz around the globe in seconds damaging a company's brand and even market share. Businesses will require more tools, more expertise, and more engagement into capturing every customer word online." – Joe Doyle, Marketing Director EMA, Sitel

"I don't think anyone can ignore the fact that social media will play an increasingly important role for any marketing or customer care program in 2011. Social media has become another highly trafficked marketing channel, and organizations will continue to align systems and strategies to affect better customer engagement through it. As with call centers, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook present marketers with the opportunity to personally engage with their customers. However, it's crucial that as organizations integrate social CRM across their channels their marketing messages remain highly targeted and tailored to each customer. —Mark Smith, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Portrait Software

"Customers are now reaching out to companies through many channels and even multiple social media sites. In 2011 businesses will need to enable a multichannel social media approach for customer service if they're going to actively reach and engage in conversations with all of their customers. By being active on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, and elsewhere, retailers can interact with and engage shoppers in ways not possible just several years ago. Social customer service is also replacing the comment card; consumers who use social media express honest opinions about what they like and don't like, and businesses need to take these comments seriously, especially because of the viral nature of social media sites. Doing it right when it comes to social media will increasingly mean getting customer service and call center teams to help." – Duke Chung, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Parature

"A lot of people will be talking about experiences they had via mobile. By next year…there will be a lot of dynamics and challenges and there will be far more people transacting on their mobile devices. The question is, 'How do you support them?' The agents will have to say, 'What version of phone are you on?' 'Are you on 3G or not?' Are you on Wi-Fi?' There are a lot of things adding into layers of complexity, making it hard to get their arms around.
– Geoff Galat, Vice President, World Wide Marketing, Tealeaf

"What we may see is the blending of the role between traditional service and sales…. Another factor at work is the increasing use of text-based interaction over voice. In a customer service setting, there are clear advantages in the customer service agent interacting with multiple channels simultaneously." – Steve Castro-Miller, CEO, Bold Software

"Customer service will become a valuable moment of truth. As more companies do customer journey mapping, they will realize that customer service has a disproportionate impact on customer perception and loyalty. Companies will begin optimizing customer service interactions to build long-term loyalty, no longer obsessing about squeezing 50 cents out of the cost of a call. Say goodbye to average handle time as the key metric." – Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience Transformist and Managing Partner, The Temkin Group

"There will be an increase in proactive customer service in 2011. Proactive chat and click-to-call have been associated primarily with sales objectives, but e-business leaders will increasingly explore proactive live help technologies to assist with customers with service issues."
– Diane Clarkson, Analyst Serving eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals, Forrester Research

"In 2011 customer service will start to be recognized as a critical part of the customer experience ecosystem. Executives will stop treating customer service as a cost center and will instead leverage it as a high-touch loyalty driver and, wherever possible, a revenue generator. We'll also see customer service employees gain stature in organizations as a resource for prized customer insights." – Kerry Bodine. Vice President, Principal Analyst, Serving Customer Experience Professionals, Forrester Research
Read more at www.1to1media.com

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The joy of stats (data viz and stats documentary w/ Hans Rosling)

2011-01-06T10:32:00.001-08:00

A very entertaining TV documentary about statistics and data visualization hosted by Hans Rosling, which means that you will get some insightful and funny stats on Sweden. I particularly enjoyed the enlistment of Florence Nightingale to the ranks of UX pioneers.

Amplify’d from www.youtube.com

See more at www.youtube.com

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Jordan Edmiston Group report on M&A trends from 2010 provides useful insight to marketing tech trends.

2011-01-03T06:08:00.001-08:00

Tolman Geffs, a Co-President with The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc. (JEGI), provided the audience at IAB's 2010 MIXX Conference on September 28 in New York City with his insights on the current M&A market and an outlook for 2011 and looking forward.

The report offers several key insights, such as:

number of deals has rebounded but attributed deal capital has not

unprecedented cash levels on S&P 1500 balance sheets

private equity firms have $400B in capital overhang

media convergence as marketing moves into tech and tech moves into marketing

The report also dives into the online display ad and other marketing tech datapoints that clearly point towards the opportunity in accumulating and selling data as it discusses the rapidly changing interactive advertising landscape. Publishers are learning to leverage data, analytics, and video to enhance their offerings for advertisers/clients.

Tolman concludes the presentation with five humorous predictions you won't want to miss!

Download it here: http://www.jegi.com/files/docs/IABMIXX.pdf

Check out other reports from JEGI here: http://www.jegi.com/industry-reports

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The internet changes nothing - worth a read to find any truths wading in the cynicism.

2011-01-02T13:09:00.001-08:00

I found my way to this link from one of the articles in my user-experience daily on paper.li. The essayist takes the stance that while we do have an opportunity to do more than we used to and to broaden our horizons, most people will instead exhibit traditional behavior patterns regardless of the network or change of delivery channel. This is contrary to the hype created by media experts (especially social media experts) wherein the internet is purported to transform everything from democracy to the economy.

Amplify’d from www.hnn.us

We knew the revolution wouldn’t be televised, but many of us really hoped it might be on the Internet. Now we know these hopes were false. There was no Internet Revolution and there will be no Internet Revolution. We will stumble on in more or less exactly the way we did before massive computer networks infiltrated our daily lives. Just look around and you will see that the Singularity is not near. For some reason we don’t want to admit this fact. Media experts still talk as if the Internet is new, as if it is still evolving, as if it will shortly “change everything.” They tell us that the Web will let us build super networks (The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom), organize ourselves in magical ways (Here Comes Everyone: The Power of Organizing without Organization), and even learn new things (Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge). These new powers will in turn enable us to transform our economy (Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything), revolutionize politics (The Revolution will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything) or perhaps even destroy our culture (The Cult of the Amateur. How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture).
Read more at www.hnn.us

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Keeping essential humanity in mind

2011-01-01T18:20:00.001-08:00

Consider the following quote:

If you don’t keep in mind the essential humanity of it all, technique will dominate.

~Irving Kirshner 1923-2010

While Kirshner was specifically talking about film and the act of directing, there is a universal truth to this idea. All experiences risk becoming a thesis on technique when the act of creation and the process bleed through to the front of the glass.

Essential humanity.

While it would seem that to subvert the necessary and the humane for the sake of recognition of technique seems at conflict with the very act of creating an experience, there may be cues provided to the audience that can only surface through explicit technique.

Sharing the story of the technique and craft becomes part of the experience. At one extreme all magic and mystery is maintained to increase the ability to participate in the idea; while at the other end of the spectrum the very act of creation and design is part of the experience. Both approaches to keep the essential humanity in mind and both approaches benefit from the same degrees of imagination, execution ability and craft.

Technique will dominate.

All parties benefit when we decide to share how we arrived at an idea, how we solved a problem or how we created an experience. Depending on the specific outcome desired, the appropriate time to share technique may differ. Eventually the question of how will come forward. Even when we know that a magician will never disclose the truth behind an illusion we still seek to understand without their participation.

While film sets a unique challenge in this regard, exceptional data visualization actually unfolds the solution to this predicament perfectly. The ability to rationalize, consume, comprehend and take action on information is assumed. The relationships inferred between discrete bits of information are used to inform the process of understanding. The source is obfuscated until such time as it needs to be revealed.

In this regard we could say that when we keep the essential humanity in mind, technique may dominate as required.

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Visualizing great experiences

2010-12-31T12:21:00.001-08:00

Combining data visualization and customer experience into one post makes this my fave 'review' post of the season.

Amplify’d from www.customerthink.com

Information graphics have become a popular communication medium for a wide variety topics. While many of the most popular infographics focus on technological and social trends, there were several customer-centric illustrations this year that evoked important discussions and furthered the customer experience movement.

This post gathers seven of the most popular (and by popular, I mean most discussed) customer infographics from the past year. While the data and assumptions are questionable in some, there’s no doubt they all contributed to the customer service and experience landscape of 2010.

1. Customer Service Best Practices

2. Online Retailers’ $44 Billion Customer Experience Problem

3. What Is Good Customer Service?

4. The Value of an Existing Customer

5. Customer Service Statistics

6. Fastest Ways to Lose Customers

7. The Evolution of Social CRM

See more at www.customerthink.com

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New year's resolutions: use practical wisdom and be a craftsman.

2010-12-31T08:08:00.001-08:00

I found the following TED talk from Barry Schwartz at the headquarters to be consistent with the themes I have been toying with: connecting group psychology, sociology and economic theory together in such a way as to ultimately surface "doing the right thing". This is fundamental to the bets I am making on 2011 and while it would be easy to regard this mission as hopeless, I am committing to both feeling and being allowed to be virtuous and to helping others find their way to this same place in their work, love, play, design and craft.

Amplify’d from www.ted.com

In an intimate talk, Barry Schwartz dives into the question "How do we do the right thing?" With help from collaborator Kenneth Sharpe, he shares stories that illustrate the difference between following the rules and truly choosing wisely.

Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. Lately, working with Ken Sharpe, he's studying wisdom. Full bio and more links
Read more at www.ted.com

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Can an experience culture be designed? What would be the attributes? UX Mag post ~ Cynthia Thomas, Translator

2010-12-30T11:42:00.001-08:00

A culture of excellence succeeds through design - thoughtful and appropriate design that becomes implicit in every conversation, every opportunity, every transaction and a key part of every employee's toolkit for success. The attributes of action orientation over process, problem-solving over execution and collaborative and creative at the core are great building blocks for this design.

Amplify’d from uxmag.com

Can a Culture Be Designed?

The short answer: yes. This is the definition of culture:

The attitudes and behavior that are characteristic of a particular social group or organization.^[*]

Attitudes and behaviors are constantly being shaped within organizations. It's the reason there are performance reviews, processes and procedures, and role expectations. If business leaders want to foster a specific culture, then all opportunities, activities, and expectations of their staffs will be measured against the success of exemplifying that culture. To design is to plan something for a specific role, purpose, or effect—to work out its form. Company culture is designed in every conversation, and in every bit of feedback and evaluation criteria. It's possible to control the corporate atmosphere by choosing which behaviors to support and encourage, and which to discourage. Cultures grow organically, but they are actively designed.

In today's world, customers expect companies to focus on experience. In order to meet that expectation, a company's UX and CX efforts cannot be isolated in a single department, or in one or two positions. The experiences that resonate and are successful for customers are those that are seamless across all touchpoints; experiences should seem to originate from the whole company, not just from whichever department they sprung from within an organization. Companie cannot lean on the experiences customers have with the "customer satisfaction team" and call it a day. Every role within an organization should work together and towards the vision of how the brand interacts with its customers.

So what are the attributes of an experience-driven culture? While the subject is still evolving, I believe there are three core attributes of a experience-focused culture:

Action, not process-oriented

Problem solving, not execution-focused

Creativity and collaboration at the core
Read more at uxmag.com

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From the 'proof is that it's possible' category - DJ Earworm mashes the Billboard Top 25 of 2010

2010-12-30T10:37:00.001-08:00

I sense a theme...

Amplify’d from www.youtube.com

See more at www.youtube.com

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100 Things to Watch in 2011

2010-12-28T12:14:00.001-08:00

A thoughtful presentation from JWT Intelligence:

JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2011

View more presentations from JWTIntelligence.

Stop trying to define the damn thing and, instead, design the damn thing. ~Jeff Gothelf

2010-12-19T14:01:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.jeffgothelf.com

Over and over again, it seems, practitioners within the User Experience world stir up flame wars and heated debates about what it is exactly that we do and what it should be called. From Interaction Design to User Experience Design to Information Architecture to UI Design, titles and job specifications vary as frequently as Sean Combs’ stage names.

Here’s a suggestion: stop trying to define the damn thing and, instead, design the damn thing.
Read more at www.jeffgothelf.com

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The Enterprise 2.0 Crystal Ball from Scott Ryser on CMSWire

2010-12-19T10:27:00.001-08:00

Scott Ryser's unofficial predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2011 have new and old players alike coming out of the woodwork. I just happen to do woodwork in my spare time so that works out perfectly...

Amplify’d from www.cmswire.com

1. Even the Cautious Stick a Toe in the Water

2. The Novelty Wears Off, the Money Rolls In

3. E2.0 Debuts on the Org Chart

4. Did You Say Lotus ShareForce?

5. Security Becomes a Political Issue

6. It’s Not a Business, It’s a Movement
Read more at www.cmswire.com

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What's the point of Enterprise RIA?

2010-12-18T05:41:00.001-08:00

While I agree that having compelling, engaging software could be cliché, it still seems to me that talking about it is decidedly more cliché than actually doing something about it. I still see a lot of enterprise software that looks like unreadable spreadsheets or is simply a scrape of terminal applications in a runtime chrome.

On the other hand I also suspect that we are not going to get up on our soapbox without faceplanting off the slippery top. The power to create compelling, engaging interfaces is inevitably going to fall into the wrong hands and we are likely going to see some apps that are too rich and too engaging and just as effectively silo’d as their predecessors before the real killers emerge.

Read more at www.redmonk.com

Beyond videos, cartoons, and web sites driving towards entertainment, rich user experiences platforms are looking towards “enterprise” use cases for novel and productive uses. While the content and the interaction may be different – you’re trying to get something done in an enterprise setting, not just fill your time with fun – the basic technologies remain the same.

What’s the point of Enterprise RIA?

The discussion starts with Adobe’s Ben Watson (that's me) who explains what this enterprise RIA concept is and why it matters to companies. The idea of having a compelling, engaging piece of software is normally cliché, but Ben does a good job of explaining why you want that, what the benefits are and how that kind of experience can help organizations:

Mobile Kiosk

Next up, we talk with Universal Mind’s Chris Rogers who talks to us about the process and tactics of doing an enterprise RIA project. I tend to think that “has a good user experience” is a different requirement to push through a project, so I wanted to hear how Universal Mind manages to do it. Chris gives a good, quick overview based on their word in the field:

After this project and process talk, Chris shows us an enterprise RIA prototype they’ve built that around cellphone users interacting with their account across different form factors, including a kiosk that we see on the show floor:

Beyond the clip-board with medical records

There’s few enterprise-y scenarios more fraught with pit-falls than converting the medical industry over to paperless, getting rid off all those paper and pen forms doctors, nurses, and hospital staff seem to have a tragic romance with. Thanks to the sheer beauty of new form factors, like the iPad, the folks at Ensemble have been finding success using enterprise RIA as the way to digitize medical records.

First, Ensemble’s Vlad Ghelesel gives us an overview of the project and how enterprise RIA is being applied:

After this overview, Vlad shows us a demo of the product in action on, of course, an iPad:

In addition to the videos above, you can subscribe to the RedMonk Media feed, for example, in iTunes, to have them automatically downloaded.
Read more at www.redmonk.com

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Engaging communities using data visualization

2010-12-16T11:30:00.001-08:00

One of our new enterprise partners, Sapient Nitro, does a lot of interesting work in this area. The Now Network project that they did for Sprint was an interesting example of how to bring different data sources into a single interface. Increasingly I am seeing visualization as a B2C mechanism that is both engaging and interesting that provides a mental advantage through a potentially trusted point of interaction. As enterprise technologists I truly hope we do not abuse this potential point of interaction but more importantly I look forward to applications that use this data and the learning within it as a starting point for new experiences that are inspired by what we learn from the information we consume and share.

Amplify’d from www.readwriteweb.com

Data visualization is a medium for understanding information that had previously been the domain of scientists and researchers.

Today, due to the amount of data available, there is an increasing need to find new ways of understanding what information means that is available through social networks and throughout the Web.

Engaging Online Communities is a report we published this week that explores ways to engage with customers. It looks at the tools available to engage, collect and analyze information.

See more at www.readwriteweb.com

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Awesome and creepy cinematic/design execution from BMW

2010-12-12T17:15:00.001-08:00

I recommend watching this in full screen HD to get the full effect.

Amplify’d from www.vanksen.com

The brand used flash projector technology to reproduce what happens when you look up at the sun, or see a flash of light: when you close your eyes, you see the contours of that light slowly fade away.

In a recent cinema ad, a really intense racer, all high off his follow-your-dream juice, asked people to close their eyes following a flash of light at the end – and when they did, what they saw were the sharp contours of BMW.

See more at www.vanksen.com

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Building permanent bridges to great customer experience

2010-12-06T07:03:00.001-08:00

Many executives and IT management I have met with over the past year share the pursuit of customer experience excellence but they also share a similar pain point - you have to start somewhere and you can't do it all, at least not all at once.

When marketing and technology come together to support a paradigm shift this large it creates natural pressure to get it right and get it right now. There is no shortage of data that points to real business justification for building stronger ties to your customers. Consider these data points from Forrester, Gartner and others in the space:

Companies are increasing their investment in their most important asset – customers - with 90% seeing this as the most important investment they need to make
A company could increase revenues by over $12 million annually in the research and sales process, while the cost savings for improving service could reach $2 million by improving online customer experience
Increasing customer satisfaction by 10% for Global 500 companies can lead to additional $200M in potential revenue (on average)
Four attributes will characterize the next phase of development - experiences will be: customized by the end user, aggregated at the point of use, relevant to the moment, and social as a rule, not an exception. Forrester's Megan Burns refers to this as the CARS principle.
50% of customer service applications are custom built and the packaged customer service app market is highly fragmented, often focusing on a single channel of interaction
57% of online customers will abandon a purchase & 65% are very unlikely to return if you do not provide a good online experience

Productivity experts clearly favor the most successful strategy for any large to-do list as breaking it down into manageable pieces and this is no exception. There are some things you could consider in your breakdown to help you prioritize, such as:

Finding a quick win that will produce fast or high return and does not require a long project to implement
Choosing a starting point that will build in a platform or cultural shift that will support further projects or broader change
Using data to determine where you have low satisfaction or bottlenecks that could ease conversion or increase loyalty
Focusing on people's passion or commitment to get behind a specific area of change

Many of Adobe's customers who are focused on transforming their customer experience have done exactly this. By focusing on key touchpoints in a customer's journey around points of conversion (acquisition) or complex support interactions (service) they were able to identify projects that were addressable, had clear KPIs, and would help them put in place a signpost for future change and a platform to support that change. What follows are some great examples of companies who have tackled the customer journey one step at a time, and they were able to start and finish with a clear and attainable goal.

EBS (more info)

The team at EBS recognized that information technology is a powerful tool in delivering value to the business and to members. EBS had an aging client/server technology for mortgage origination that lacked flexibility and did not offer members intuitive and engaging ways to do business with the organization. Driven initially by the need to replace this mortgage origination system — a crucial tool for specialists in 100 branches across Ireland selling mortgages to members — EBS embarked on a major IT modernization project by starting at the beginning of a customer's journey with them. Along the way they realized some substantial benefits:

Reduced time to process mortgage quotes by 62%
Determined member needs based on age, savings, debt, and other factors, using information from disparate systems
Linked with multiple systems to recommend a complete array of relevant financial products
Increased value of every member transaction
Transformed back-office system into dynamic, front-office sales tool
Cut total cost of ownership by leveraging existing SOA infrastructure

Another factor driving technology and business process transformation at EBS was the need to comply with “Know Your Customer” (KYC) regulations. KYC requires financial institutions to identify new clients and gather relevant information prior to conducting financial business with them.

“We stay ahead of the industry curve, and we wanted to be among the first to comply with KYC rules, but we saw KYC as more than just a compliance requirement,” says David Yeates, head of IT for EBS.. “We recognized that KYC was an opportunity to more efficiently gather new members’ financial information up-front to serve them more professionally and efficiently, and to tailor product and service offerings to their individual needs.”

EBS put in place a technology solution built on Adobe LiveCycle ES using Adobe Flex that leveraged its Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), existing IBM WebSphere application server and IBM mainframe environment.

Other companies that also benefited from this focus on initial interactions and the purchase process include:

impuls systems, who signs up new customers online and streamlines closing contracts, strengthening competitive advantage and doubling online engagement. More
Verizon Wireless, who built an online storefront for engaging customer experience and increased revenue from online media assets. More

It starts with conversion, but don't stop there

Another key area to consider is the second call a customer makes. This is the call a customer makes after they have signed up and configured their product or service and are experiencing a service, product or administrative issue that is going to require some help. If you acquired the customer online, you have a much better chance of successfully serving them online but you need to invest in this touchpoint to make it as seamless and effective as possible. According to Forrester, more than 70% of customers still abandon online service and support situations in favor of more expensive support channels and this is hurting your brand image, impacting customer satisfaction and costing you money every time it happens. For many executives I talk to this is the most important touch point and even if that is debatable the value of getting it right is not.

Rooted in the firm belief that there is no better place to receive medical treatment than in the healing environment of the home, Janus Health set out to transform the delivery of in-home care for doctors and patients. Janus built a rich Internet application (RIA) workspace leveraging Adobe LiveCycle ES solutions that enables doctors to provide full-service, compliant medical attention to patients in-home.

This initial investment not only provided payback in terms of the quality of care provided, it also helped the IT team to put a platform in place that they can build further projects on, effectively increasing the ROI of each subsequent project.

C. Gresham Bayne, an M.D. and Janus Health co-founder, told Adobe, “Escalating healthcare costs can be reduced dramatically by offering acute care in patients’ homes. Adobe LiveCycle ES provides vital tools for solving the complex information and business processing requirements for in-home healthcare."

Along the way they also realized some other benefits, including:

Streamlined compliance with privacy and Medicare regulations
Increased number of housecalls possible in one day
Reduced Medicare program administration costs
Automated processes for ordering prescription, imaging, equipment, and other critical services

You have to start somewhere

Your customers, partners and business suppliers interact with your company in a myriad of ways across multiple channels and using increasingly sophisticated systems and devices to do this. Having a technology platform that can help you detangle the problem is a good place to start but an even better place to start is based on what customers need and how employees can help them.

According to Patricia Seybold, whose Customers.com initiative strikes at the heart of this work, "You should realize that this is probably the most challenging and gratifying work you’ll ever do in your career. The satisfaction that comes from working on applications that touch the customer directly is immense. The continuous feedback you get from customers as they use these systems gives you clear, unequivocal priorities for each of your releases."

When you realize additional benefits along the way this is your customer karma and it's performing an important task in building your overall reputation. It's bringing you happier, higher value customers and empowered, satisfied employees all based on the simple fact that together they can get things done and they can do it in a rewarding, engaging and frictionless way. This feeling, coupled with some customer data and proofpoints prove that your efforts are focused on the right things. Cultural and technology shifts will empower the next wave of even more successful and even more rewarding customer experiences.

Re-posted from http://amplify.com/u/hqmo

10 irregular predictions (and somewhat hilarious) stolen, borrowed, plagiarized and culled by Dennis Howlett

2010-12-05T16:08:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.zdnet.com

‘Tis that time once again when analysts of all stripes have the Pavlov Dog urge to churn out predictions for the coming year. They can’t help themselves. In the spirit of injecting realism into such things here are my highly Irregular predictions for 2011. Some have been stolen, borrowed, plagiarized or culled from colleagues’ remarks on Twitter. You know who you are but trust me; I’m in media; I’ve got your backs.

2011 will be like 2010 only more so.

Collaboration will be big. Somewhere.

It will be increasingly cloudy. Especially in Manchester, north west England where they get 300 days of rain a year. Elsewhere, the IT media will be buried in cloudy press releases.

Industry analysts wont revisit their 2010 predictions without massaging what they said before. Almost nobody will notice except those who keep an eye on quantitative analyses and call bull on the numbers.

Industry analysts that got more than 10% of their predictions right will crow over their ability to predict the future. Nobody else will care.

Industry analysts will make bold predictions for 2011 based on their current research agendas. Vendors whose offerings align will sign away millions in wasted ‘research.’

Software will conclusively prove that cows are the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases. The ensuing bovine cull will ensure population starvation on a massive scale thus solving our climate change issues. Those flogging carbon solutions will be put out of business.

Someone will insert an RSS enabled RFID device into Mark Zuckerberg’s rectum so that we all get to know what he really thinks about privacy. As a result, Zuck will have to endure a TSA pat down but will opt to be processed in a private area. That won’t prevent any of us from knowing what’s going on while enterprise security experts study the resultant data stream with interest.

Social business consultants will win huge government contracts - to be executed from padded cells over the next 25 years. People like me will be relieved that the madness of social business has been correctly allocated the appropriate resources.

Social media will suffer a backlash (oops - it’s already happened but the social media mavens didn’t notice. This is just to keep them up to speed.)

Read more at www.zdnet.com

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200 Years In 4 Minutes

2010-12-04T11:44:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.talkingpointsmemo.com

Via the BBC, Hans Rosling examines the correlation between income growth and life expectancy in 200 countries over the last 200 hundred years in an amazing animation. Take a look:

See more at www.talkingpointsmemo.com

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AAA on investment in CX and UX and measuring the payoff.

2010-12-01T11:30:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from uxmag.com

UX Magazine sat down with Sylvia Veitia, Vice President of Member Experience at AAA at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum. This discussion was part of our ongoing effort to profile business UX leaders so other businesspeople can learn from the examples set by other managers and executives, and so practitioners and consultants can hear about UX from the client's perspective. You can read more about the Business UX Leaders Series here.
Read more at uxmag.com

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The work doesn't happen at work.

2010-11-30T10:06:00.001-08:00

His points on where great ideas come from (incubation time/informal networked environments that foster novel connections) support his suggestions of killing (mundane) meetings in favor of uninterrupted work time.

His research supports that in unaided recall people recount getting work done on the plane, train, during a commute, at home, at the hotel, and other random places that do not integrate well with a shredded calendar made up of broken :15 and :30 spurts.

Amplify’d from www.ted.com

See more at www.ted.com

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Augie Ray (Forrester) loves social media but he is getting sick of 8 things in particular.

2010-11-29T06:00:00.001-08:00

Augie Ray from Forrester loves social media but there are a few things he is getting sick of. I think we all share some of the same frustrations, but I found the 'backlash' items to be most insightful.

Amplify’d from blogs.forrester.com

8. Auto DMs: I've been down this road in past blog posts, so there's no need to revisit the topic, but the flood of self-serving, generic messages in my Twitter "in box" gets in the way of personalized and valuable messages I receive. I hope more people will heed the results of our recent survey about Auto DMs.

7. Peer Pressure: It's inevitable that digital social channels will suffer from the same problems as analog social channels, and peer pressure is one of those problems. It's uncomfortable to reject people who wish to connect, follow or friend; it's even worse to sever those ties once they're made. Last year I slimmed down my Facebook friends and was guilted into refriending a person who I've met only twice and have had no contact with in over 12 months. (Of course, the fact I was guilted into refriending is more my problem than her's.) I did not participate in Jimmy Kimmel's National UnFriend Day, but I appreciate the serious sentiment underlying the humor: As Kimmel has said, friendship is sacred and Facebook can cheapen it (but only if we let it by friending hundreds of people with whom we have only passing familiarity.)

6. Narcissism: I've long disdained those doubters who dismiss Social Media as a haven for narcissists, but that doesn't mean narcissism isn't alive and well in social media. There are many different kinds of narcissists in social media: There are Snow White Narcissists who every day sing about the greatness of their lives, the brightness of their futures and their thankfulness for every sunrise, budding flower and drop of rain. There are Stuart Smalley Narcissists who obsessively announce how much others think of them by thanking every new follower or retweeter or announcing when they're added to Twitter lists. And then there are Sméagol/Gollum Narcissists whose bipolar status updates vary wildly—one day it’s party pictures and tales of wonderful friends and places; the next day it’s how much they hate their jobs, the bus driver or their lives. By definition, all narcissists focus on themselves rather than others, which is what makes them so tiresome in social media.

5. Check-Ins: Someday, check-ins (from Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla and others) will be very valuable information that signal a person has true affinity and is an active customer of a business, but today the flood of one-off check-ins is nothing but meaningless noise in social channels. While marketers may want customers to blast messages to every friend each time they complete a purchase or visit a location, no one can possibly care when their friends are getting gas, grocery shopping or eating an ice cream cone. A single check-in is generally useless data but 20 check-ins demonstrate true affinity that one's friends may find helpful and worthwhile. The sooner Facebook and others can turn the stream of check-in data into affinity information, the better.

4. Facebook haters: I get it: Facebook is big, has access to a lot of personal info, and monetizes that data. Now get over it. We can hold Facebook responsible for ethical and legal behavior and appropriate transparency without bashing its existence and success. With Facebook accounting for one in four page views in the U.S. and capturing more time than any other web property (including Google, which encompasses that classic timesuck, YouTube), the time has come to stop griping and start advising. Those concerned with privacy must start counseling people on how to protect themselves on Facebook rather than complaining about Facebook, and professionals in the social media or marketing field must engage on the platform adopted by 500 million users rather than hold it at arm’s length.

3. The search for easy social media answers: Social media is new, evolving and confusing, so it’s understandable many people and businesses would struggle with its opportunities and challenges, but that should be no excuse for seeking easy answers. Nothing that matters to long-term success is ever easy, and there are (almost) no universal best practices that may be applied for every product in every category for every audience. Just as there is no single print strategy, television strategy or web strategy that works in every instance, nor will there be a universal social media strategy. From audience identification to goal setting to ROI measurement to execution, every organization’s social media strategies will be unique. By all means, learn from what competitors and others are doing, but recognize that true strategic benefits will only accrue to those who commit to differentiation through learning, experimenting and iterating.

2. Claims of social media backlash and fatigue: I’m hearing tales of people tired of social media who are pulling back or opting out completely, but those seem to be exactly that—tales and not fact. For every rare individual who exits from social media, dozens more enter or deepen their engagement. While some complex social behaviors are stalling in the U.S., Forrester data demonstrates the number of people maintaining a profile in social networks continues to grow. Before you buy into any claims that some are tiring of social media, consider two things: The first is how inherently social humans are, and the second is how much social media has evolved and will continue to change. Just as the Internet of 2010 is a very different beast than the Internet of 2000, we can expect the same sort of evolution and growth in social media in the years to come. The social tools of 2015 will be easier, more personalized, more useful and more valuable, and people will not be less social in the future than they are today. Look for engagement to increase, not diminish, as tools improve.

1. What's the next big thing? This is one of the most common questions I’ve been asked since joining Forrester a year ago. We all love new things and want to be on the cutting edge, but focusing on some hypothetical post-Facebook and -Twitter world gets in the way of attending to the very real things that must be done today. Obviously, there will be a “next big thing”—perhaps it will be geolocation, mobile, cloud, the semantic Web, interactive TV, augmented reality, nanotechnology, serendipitous search, or some combination thereof—but let’s walk before we run! It does a company no good to speculate or bet on the “next big thing” when they haven’t yet cracked the code on listening to customers, responding, engaging and fostering advocacy in today’s most popular social channels. For the vast majority of organizations and people, the next big thing IS social media and will be for years to come.
Read more at blogs.forrester.com

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300 Years of fossil fuel in 300 Seconds

2010-11-28T18:52:00.001-08:00

Well done.

Amplify’d from www.youtube.com

300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds

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Interesting @forrester 's @mgualtieri on how Java will not survive new biz reqs and a bungled presentation tier.

2010-11-23T19:21:00.001-08:00

Mike makes an interesting case here to look for better ways to develop applications - simpler, faster ways to develop against increasingly complex business requirements. The data shows continued growth for Java of course, but Mike counters this saying that 'data can only show us what has happened' and that the combination of emerging tools and BPM play a significant role in how change will come about.

Amplify’d from blogs.forrester.com

Forrester data reveals that Java is still firmly planted in enterprise IT shops for custom-developed applications. (See Figure). But, data always tells us what happened in the past and does not predict the future. Application developers should also not make the mistake that adoption means goodness.

Java is not going away for business applications, just as COBOL is not going away. Java is still a great choice for app dev teams that have developed the architecture and expertise to develop and maintain business applications. It is also an excellent choice (along with C#) for software vendors to develop tools, utilities, and platforms such as BPM, CEP, IaaS, and ECP. Software such as operating systems, databases, and console games are still mostly developed in C++.

Java development is too complex for business application development. Enterprise application development teams should plan their escape from Java because:

Business requirements have changed. The pace of change has increased

Development authoring is limited to programming languages. Even though the Java platform supports additional programming languages such as Groovy and JRuby, the underlying platform limits innovation to the traditional services provided by Java. You can invent as many new programming languages as you want, but they must all be implementable in the underlying platform.

Java bungled the presentation layer. Swing is a nightmare and JavaFX is a failure. JSF was designed for pre-Ajax user interfaces even though some implementations such as ICEfaces incorporate Ajax. There is a steady stream of new UI approaches reflecting Java lack of leadership in in the presentation layer.

Java frameworks prove complexity. Hibernate, Spring, Struts, and other frameworks reveal Java’s deficiencies rather than its strengths. A future platform shouldn't need a cacophony of frameworks just to do the basics.

Java is a 20 year old language based on C++. Is this really the best way to develop enterprise business applications?

Java’s new boss is the same as the old boss. Oracle’s reign is unlikely to transform Java.Oracle’s recent Java announcementswere a disappointment. They are focused on more features, more performance, and more partnerships with other vendors. So far, it appears that Oracle is continuing with Sun’s same failed Java policies.

Java has never been the only game in town. C# is not the alternative. It is little more than Java Microsoft style. But, there are new developer tools such as Microsoft Lightswitch and WaveMaker. And traditional, but updated 4GL tools such as Compuware Unifaceand Progress OpenEdge. And don’t forget about business rules platforms, business process management (BPM), and event processing platforms that enable faster change offer by enterprise software vendors such as IBM, Progress, TIBCO, Software AG.

What It Means: Application Development Teams Must Find A Better Way To Develop Apps

Many enterprise application development teams are already using a combination of tools and technologies to overcome the complexity and inflexibility of Java applications. BPM is used to quickly define and change business processes, collaboration suites like Sharepoint and Lotus are used to respond to the increasing demands of long-tail apps. Progress Software’s responsive process management (RPM) combines the best of BPM and business events to help businesses respond to real-time events and change business processes. This is just a small sampling of the next generation tools of business application development tools
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Customer experience momentum...blog post from @dawnamaclean

2010-11-23T05:38:00.001-08:00

I had the opportunity to present alongside Forrester's Megan Burns ( @mbcxp ), Adobe's Sydney Sloan ( @sydsloan ) and Further Ahead leader Derek Featherstone ( @feather ) at this event. Often self-critical when in presentation mode, I am overtly aware of incongruous messaging and differences in the approaches that speakers will take.

In this case though, I tend to agree with Dawna's assessment that the day had a good flow and the audience stayed engaged even when we (I, really went over the allotted time. I was more concerned initially about overlap in the sessions but in the end the overlaps provided handshakes which is always ideal, even if you didn't really plan it out that way.

Thanks for a great post/review, Dawna.

Amplify’d from dawnamaclean.com

Eyes are opening. The signs are everywhere, appreciation and awareness of the relevance of customer experience continues to gain momentum. Last week I had the privilege of attending an Adobe Customer Experience Seminar in Toronto. It was a diverse audience from differing industries. While few attendees had extensive previous exposure to this topic, they all came eager to learn. The day began with Megan Burns, Principal Analyst of Forrester, talking about The State of Customer Experience. If that sounds familiar, I blogged about her presentation back in September when she spoke at the Adobe Partner Partner Community Day in NYC. I recommend taking the time to watch it now if you have not already seen it. I was excited to see that Megan had added emphasis on the the importance of employee experience, in fact this was strongly echoed in the following two presentations. Customer experience and employee experience are tightly coupled, a sustained positive customer experience requires a positive employee experience so I am pleased to see this start to take center stage in customer experience discussions.
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Cut through the cookie madness to stop data leakage.

2010-11-20T21:02:00.001-08:00

The pattern implicit in ushering used in a controlled fashion could be key. Either way perhaps some type of tag aggregation and tightly controlled data sharing seems prudent.

Amplify’d from www.mediapost.com

If publishers don't start making the most of the data they collect on user behavior, then someone else already piggy-backing on their site will. As cookies start flying every which way to feed this complex ad-targeting infrastructure online, the big topic for content providers is "data leakage." Who is collecting data on a publisher's users via third-party cookies and without the publisher's knowledge or consent? We have already seen this year some yield optimizers try to service this worry among their publisher partners. A new category of tag/cookie containers has cropped up, promising to give publishers greater control over the tracking pixels and cookies that get planted on their site.

How bad is the problem? While admittedly an interested party, one solution provider in the category, Krux Digital, claims in a new study that an analysis of the top 50 publishers online shows they may be losing between $850 million to $1.2 billion to third parties. The ad network ecosystem is monetizing data that the publishers should be using more effectively rather than sharing indiscriminately. "Publishers are being technologically outmatched on the buy side when it comes to targeting and leveraging their unique assets to their fullest purpose," says Ben Crain, vice president of marketing and corporate development, Krux. Crain says Krux has the data to prove it. In late summer the company started analyzing a sample of URLs across the top 50 sites to see what data collection was being done, whether it was on the page itself, in an iframe, or from an ad call. Krux found 167 different entities participating in data collection on these sites.

Almost a third (31%) of data collection on a page was being done by a third party, and in many cases by yet another party whose tracking tag or cookie was being "ushered" in by the most apparent third party. In fact, over half (55%) of the third parties also brought at least one other data collector with them. The sheer volume of the entities involved across so muchinventory has to cause some concern among publishers about who is sharing with whom. How much knowledge does a content owner have of the embedded partners in a cookie?
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Multitouch Kinect hack...bit o' Minority Report style.

2010-11-20T17:26:00.001-08:00

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Use case maps: casual scenarios, architectural entities or behaviour patterns?

2010-11-19T13:34:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from jucmnav.softwareengineering.ca

The basic idea of UCM is very simple and is captured by the phrase causal paths cutting across organizational structures. The realization of this idea produces a lightweight notation that scales up, while at the same time covering all of the foregoing complexity factors in an integrated and manageable fashion. The notation represents causal paths as sets of wiggly lines that enable a person to visualize scenarios threading through a system without the scenarios actually being specified in any detailed way (e.g. with messages). Compositions of wiggly lines (which may be called behavior structures) represent large-scale units of emergent behavior cutting across systems, such as network transactions, as first-class architectural entities that are above the level of details and independent of them (because they can be realized in different detailed ways).

Requirements engineering and design of:

Real-time systems

Object-oriented systems

Telecommunication systems

Distributed systems

Business processes

Multimedia systems

Agent systems

E-health systems

Aspected-oriented models

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Analytics play critical role in informing design decisions, but Facebook designers are wary of design by number

2010-11-15T17:05:00.001-08:00

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Manage development in the cloud - Floruit labs.

2010-11-12T13:08:00.001-08:00

Amplify’d from www.readwriteweb.com

These days you can do pretty much everything in the cloud - why not manage your entire development process there too? Many are already using GitHub or hosted SVN solutions, so the concept isn't radical. Cloud hosting can ease collaboration outside the firewall - whether that's with remote team members or business partners or clients. Floruit aims to give developers and managers a unified view of projects by uniting offering a single Amazon AWS hosted SaaS suite that includes bug tracking, change management, knowledge management, etc.

The tool is built almost entirely on Adobe, using Flex and ColdFusion for the backend and Flash and AIR for the front end. Floruit also has a beta connector for LiveCycle. So for Adobe-centric develops, this suite could make a lot of sense. Adobe-haters might want to run away quickly.

VP Technology Strategy Gwen Pope says most companies that adopt solutions like find that developers end up abandoning it and using their own tools and managing things in an ad-hoc fashion. That's an opportunity for Floruit. The biggest competition Floruit will face will likely be from hosts of Atlassian products like JIRA and Confluence.
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Erik Hersman (Interaction 11 keynote speaker) on design in Africa. A Johnny Holland interview.

2010-11-08T13:33:00.001-08:00

Johnny Holland posted an interview today with Ushahidi founder Erik Hersman, one of the Interaction11 conference keynote speakers. JH talked with Erik about his hopes and dreams for crowdsourcing, and the role interaction designers can play in fulfilling that dream. Erik also talks about how he wants to touch on some of the constraints and cultural differences impacting design in Africa.

Amplify’d from johnnyholland.org

Recently we got a chance to interview Erik Hersman. He is the co-founder of Ushahidi, a web application created to map the reported incidents of violence happening during the post-election crisis in Kenya.

For those who don’t know you. Could you please introduce yourself?

Certainly. I grew up in Africa, Sudan and Kenya to be exact, and I live here in Nairobi with my family. I’m intrigued by the way technology helps us overcome inefficiencies in the system, of which we have our fair share on the continent. This led me to start blogging at WhiteAfrican and AfriGadget many years ago, and it was the driver for me co-founding Ushahidi and building the iHub this year.
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Andrew Bird - an orchestra of one. #TED #imagination

2010-11-06T09:25:00.001-07:00

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Art-ificial reef is an act of curious art activism

2010-11-06T07:46:00.001-07:00

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How social should, and will, stack up in the business stack.

2010-11-05T06:05:00.001-07:00

Industry Reference: Social Business Stack for 2011

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UX becomes a genuine layer, not a tarpaulin

2010-11-04T14:06:00.001-07:00

This is consistent with the message and direction our teams at Adobe are working on. As Erik Larson, a colleague in product management that is driving a lot of this hints at in the post (after the link) we have already started to deliver solutions and consulting/partner-lead projects that prove out the benefit of a true layer and our architecture is increasingly reflective of this.

Amplify’d from blogs.forrester.com

In the last few years, many teams have learned a new attitude. Instead of treating UX as a tarpaulin, thrown over the application to clumsily hold it all together, UX is as much a part of the system as the technical architecture or the application logic.

In fact, the newly-discovered appreciation for UX has proceeded far enough that it's time to start treating UX as its own application layer. That's what Erik Larson of Adobe argued at a discussion between Adobe and industry analysts about a month ago. Larson's basic point was that UX is an intrinsic part of the application, not an extrinsic afterthought. It not only defines the face of the application that the user sees, but it also may include the sensors that detect and record how that person uses the application. (That actually sounds like two layers, not one, but there's no need to split hairs just yet.)

Traditionally, measuring usage was something that IT departments did – and not as frequently as they should– to gauge the return on their technology investment. Now, with the advent of SaaS, actual usage is a powerful business imperative for both customers and vendors. Customers still want to measure the return on their investment, measured in number of active licenses and other obvious statistics. Vendors, too, want to calculate the value of their investments, measured by the number of users who have accessed new features or the percentage of trial users who become paying customers.
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@monkchips chats with Kevin Cochran of Day Software about the fit at Adobe.

2010-11-03T09:47:00.001-07:00

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Impure: A data visualization programming language for non-programmers (still in Alpha)

2010-11-02T11:22:00.001-07:00

Love the term Visualizators to describe the 'component' that recieves external data sources, visualizes them, and returns emitters that can in turn be used as input to another module.

This looks very promising and Bestiario certainly is already one of the leaders in this space. Waiting for alpha approval at which point I will return actionable insight from the experience consumed.

Amplify’d from infosthetics.com

Impure [impure.com] is a new visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. Developed by Bestiario, a Spanish information design start-up, Impure aims to bridge the link between 'non-programmers' and data visualization by linking information to programmatic operators, controls and visualization methods through a new visual and modular interface.

Impure allows the acquisition of information from different sources, ranging from user-specific data to popular online feeds, such as from social media, real-time financial information, news or search queries. This data can then be combined in meaningful ways using built-in interactive visualizations for exploration and analysis.

Based on an event-based development structure, the software consists of 5 different modules.

1. Data Structures, which hold data coming from a data source (e.g., Number, String, List, etc.).

2. Operators, which have 1 or more receptors that enable the system to perform a specific operation (e.g., addition or subtraction).

3. Controls, which act as dynamic filters (e.g., interval selectors).

4. Visualizators, which receive data structures from operators or controls and visualize it. They usually return emitters on selected visual objects that can be used as input into another module.

5. APIs that allow real-time communication with various data sources such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Ebay, etc.
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Remove 1 data field. Increase profit by $12M. tx @monkchips

2010-11-02T07:46:00.001-07:00

Read the full case study at http://www.silicon.com/management/sales-and-marketing/2010/11/01/expedia-on-how-one-extra-data-field-can-cost-12m-39746554/

Amplify’d from www.silicon.com

Online travel firm Expedia has found that data analytics can deliver a multi-million dollar kick to a company's bottom line.

The company used analytics to identify a single change to a web page that generated an overnight surge in sales, Expedia's VP of global analytics and optimisation Joe Megibow told the Premier Business Leadership Series conference in Las Vegas last week.

Expedia analysts realised the site needed to be changed after investigating why many customers who clicked the 'Buy Now' button on the company's site did not complete the transaction.

After putting in their bank name, these customers then went on to enter the address of their bank, rather than their home address, in the address field.

"When it came to address verification to process the credit card, it failed because it was not the address of credit card holder," Megibow said.

"After we realised that we just went onto the site and deleted that field - overnight there was a step function [change], resulting in $12m of profit a year, simply by deleting a field.

"We have found 50 or 60 of these kinds of things by using analytics and paying attention to the customer."

Are we seeing things through and making sure that what we are doing is worth something?Read more at www.silicon.com

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