Our LinkedIn group to continue the conversation regarding designing awesome “first time use” experience. We’ve provided access to the material including Intuit’s design philosophy, Design for Delight, and how our team has applied it to QuickBooks on-boarding. You can download all four topics including: Jobs Framework, First Time Use Framework and worksheet, Customer Benefit framework and worksheet and access to our Discovery patterns.
]]>Penny App – Chat with Penny to track your spending and plan for a better financial future!
Posting a recent article on Brad Smith our CEO at Intuit on building a design-driven company.
From the article, “Even before I became CEO, I’d been working to help our teams understand what makes a product experience delightful. Ease of use is important, but it’s not everything. We began talking about customers’ end-to-end experience, which includes shopping, buying, and customer support. I started asking employees about the products and services they encountered in their own lives. Why do you love a product? What are the drivers of delight? And we developed D4D (design for delight), which clearly articulated Intuit’s approach to design thinking, based on deep customer empathy, idea generation, and experimentation. D4D is vital because it provides the entire company with a common framework for building great products.”
]]>from Wikipedia: “Viriditas (Latin, literally “greenness,” formerly translated as “viridity”[1]) is a word meaning vitality, fecundity, lushness, verdure, or growth. Kim Stanley Robinson used it non-theologically to mean “the green force of life, expanding into the Universe.”
In the Mars series a new belief system is created called the “Areophany“. The system is devoted to the appreciation and furthering of life (“viriditas”).
I’d like to think we as designers have a Areophany about design and want to further the most delightful experiences as possible.
From the article ” It’s hard to tell whether industrial design professor Jacques Ostiguy was crazy or a genius, or both. Either way, he’s almost definitely the most eccentric French-Canadian car designer you’ve never heard of.”
Read the article from AutoFocus here The stylist behind the Cordoba was obsessed with car design DNA
Photo credit from the article and AutoFocus
About Rhonda – USA Today columnist and entrepreneurship expert, Rhonda Abrams shares common issues for small businesses and advises on do-it-now action items to set your business up for success.
http://www.planningshop.com/rhonda-abrams/
Key issue: Good business plan “You can’t reach a goal you haven’t set it”
- Overall business plan
- Annual business planning
- Quantifiable, specific goals
- Estimate resources – time, money, people
- Set deadline
- Get real
Have a BIG IDEA journal (when you get an idea), write it down, then overtime review and assess. The most important piece of planning is what NOT to do.
Key issue: Marketing “Repetition, repetition, repetition”
- Market
- Message
- Method
Major methods, think of it as creating leads for you.
- Social media, pick the one that works for you.
- Online SEM/ads
- E-Newsletter, has about a 20% rate, which is way better than direct mail (which is 2%). It has to be relatable and thoughtful content.
- Networking/word-of-mouth, critical. Nothing beats face to face marketing.
- Traditional (meh!)
- Collateral (e.g. business card “what you do and a call to action)
Key Issue: Team “You can’t grow alone.”
- Determine your needs. “They don’t need to be on your payroll to be a team member.”
- Figure out a budget, “Are you growing a job or growing a business.” Make a choice. A business requires scale (e.g. Employees, contractors, etc)
- Start slowly, “is hiring employees really the best first start.”
- Make the mental learning “What are the job you are doing now, that are keeping you growing. Is it something you can outsource. (e.g. Administrative things)”
Key Issue: Mobile “Go mobile or go home.”
- 94% own a cell phone.
- 64% access internet on phone:
- 34% primary internet access
- 10% only internet access
What does this mean for you:
- Mobile enabled websites
- Get found
- Accept mobile payments
- Run your business in the cloud
Great list for a HOMEWORK assignment:
- List one or two niches you can /do serve
- List your specific goals for the coming year
- Define or refine your core message
- Identify skills you need to grow your business.
- Build something useful & delightful at every stage (even with limited functionality)
- Don’t just implement all the features in a half-assed way, pick a subset of features and really do a great job on them
Reference to the original post by Henrik Kniberg.
Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable
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Want to catch butterflies to earn discounts? Now you can with your iphone. Mobile Art Lab in Japan has developed a new iPhone App, iButterfly, that lets you catch virtual butterflies and turn them in for valuable offers. The application uses augmented reality to take video feed from your phone’s camera and superimposes virtual images — in this case butterflies. Users can travel all around Japan and see a wide variety of ‘butterfly species’, collect them in virtual albums, trade them with friends (via Bluetooth), or exchange them for commercial gifts. A quick swipe of the phone and the insect is caught. Restaurants or stores can make promotional offers through the iButterfly system. iButterly App is a fun and smart advertising tool disguised as a game!
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