Apr 11, 2008
(1 votes)
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Quick Hits
Sites of the Week
How about all that buzz around Earth Hour, eh? Millions of people around the globe turned out their lights, all in the support of the idea that “individual action on a mass scale can help change our planet for the better”. 24 global cities signed up, 58% of adult Australians participated and over 2100 global corporations including McDonald’s, Proctor & Gamble and Citicorp got involved. It was an engaging event to many, including me and my family. The utilities even saved a little power.
But let’s cut to a few days after. I took a day off to do some volunteer work for a local environmental organization. Naturally, discussion of Earth Hour arose during the breaks in our meetings. The consensus among the environmentalists in the room? Earth Hour was promoted with a negative message built around feelings of fear and sacrifice.
Hey - who’s calling the kettle black here?!
I made an error with the Earth Hour post that went up on Experience Matters yesterday. Due to some poor communication on my part, an earlier version was posted rather than a version that I redrafted after some advice from our editorial board. But rather than pull down the article, we thought we might use this as an opportunity to give you a little behind the scenes look at EM and how it runs. I’m also curious to hear your opinions about the articles - which do you think is better?
How about all that buzz around Earth Hour, eh? Millions of people around the globe turned out their lights, all in the support of the idea that “individual action on a mass scale can help change our planet for the better.” 24 global cities signed up, 58% of adult Australians participated and over 2100 global corporations including McDonald’s, Proctor & Gamble and Citicorp got involved. It was an engaging event to many, including me and and my family.
But let’s cut to Tuesday. I took a day off to do some volunteer work for a local environmental organization. Naturally, discussion of Earth Hour arose during the breaks in our meetings. The consensus among the people in the room? Earth Hour was a downer promoting a wrong-headed message about the need for change.
What you talking about, Willis?!
When you’re part of a department called Insight and Planning it’s probably a good idea to know what you stand for, and where your value lies. Even more importantly, you need to know how your capability helps your organization to offer a competitive point of differentiation.
Over the last year, we’ve been internally debating what it means to be insightful, and the result is this presentation. We’ve shown it to clients, peers and our own teams in what I’ll refer to as a “healthy” dialog. Over the last month, we’ve had it out in the wild on Slideshare as well where it’s been getting some healthy linkage. One of the really interesting outcomes has been the discussion about how often we abuse or misunderstand the term “insight.” More often than not, we’re confusing insights with ideas, or elevating “findings” to the status of insights. The risk with loose definitions is that you can’t really be clear about the value you provide - you’re just creating noise. As a team, we’ve got a lot of thinking rolled up in this deck, but the the bottom line is this: we have a clear view on what we think insight is, how we generate insight and how we communicate its value. Subject to change of course, but then that’s why we’re talking about it.
So what’s the value of insight to your business?
Apr 4, 2008
(1 votes) Loading ...We’ve all heard the hype on Nike Plus and what it’s done for the running community. Tying together my running data, my running community and my ipod is very cool. Microsoft and others continue to work on the concept of “Life Logging” or “life-streaming” (the visual diary) and the associated SenseCam technology to support the idea. Imagine a world were we all walk around our daily lives tracking and monitoring each and every detail? Well perhaps we’re not too far off from that reality. Both of these concepts represent very interesting impacts on people and technology. With the continued evolution and technological advances to mobile, social and the digital space as a whole it only makes sense that we are witnessing more and more confluence. These digital advances are helping to build communities, bring like-minded people together, promote self-expression and of course, provide endless new product or technology opportunities. New, singular concepts pop up all the time, what’s really cool is when they can be brought together.
Amazon rolled out their mobile shopping service yesterday for US consumers, enabled by SMS short codes. Consumers can text to AMAZON (262966) with the name, model number or ISBN number of a product to determine if Amazon offers the product, it’s price, and a summary. Short-code responses offer the option for more details, a direct URL link to the product details page, or the option to buy with a 1 character response.
The buying process is enabled with a voice call to your cell phone to walk you through a voice-response confirmation of the buying process using your registered email and zip code to tie the purchase to your Amazon profile.
When it comes to designing the experience of an end product (be it a web site or a remote control), is it better to work inside the enterprise or outside, in an agency or design consultancy? For interaction designers, both choices have pluses and minuses but both paths start with thinking about the customer.
Customer knowledge is the Holy Grail of what we do: IA, IxD, usability, etc. Typically the first words out of our mouths at the beginning of a project are “So, who are the customers? What do they want?”
(2 votes)
