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.
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.
Here’s a little bit of what goes on in each of the 5 stages (excerpt from the article)
- Stage 1 (Interested): In the first level of EBD maturity, organizations begin to believe that customer experience is an important part of their business. They start undertaking a number of different efforts without making any major investments, attempting to get a handle on the current situation. There’s a flurry of uncoordinated activity and no real leadership for customer experience activities.
- Stage 2 (Invested): Companies enter into the second level of EBD maturity after they recognize that customer experience is worthy of a significant investment; in both capital and key personnel. So the approach to customer experience becomes more organized with an intensified focus on fixing problems.
- Stage 3 (Committed): In the third level of EBD maturity, firms are embracing customer experience because they understand the specific impact it has on business results like growth and profitability. The effort is no longer isolated to a few groups as customer experience becomes a major transformational effort across the organization. Instead of just trying to fix problems, the focus turns to redesigning processes.
- Stage 4 (Engaged): When companies enter into the fourth level of EBD maturity, customer experience is a key component of everything they do. Instead of re-engineering processes, the focus turns to designing break-through experiences and solidifying the culture. There’s significant emphasis on employee engagement and companies become much less dependent on a centralized customer experience group.
- Stage 5 (Embedded): At the highest level of EBD maturity, which can take companies several years to achieve, customer experience is deeply ingrained throughout the organization. Just about every employee feels ownership for maintaining the culture. The executive team no longer focuses on change but views itself as keeper of the customer-centric culture, which is viewed as a critical asset.
You can review the complete article here:
https://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/the-customer-experience-journey/
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Great article on UI, UX: Who Does What? A Designer’s Guide To The Tech Industry
Check it out on www.fastcodesign.com
“Design is a rather broad and vague term. When someone says “I’m a designer,” it is not immediately clear what they actually do day to day. There are a number of different responsibilities encompassed by the umbrella term designer.
Design-related roles exist in a range of areas from industrial design (cars, furniture) to print (magazines, other publications) to tech (websites, mobile apps). With the relatively recent influx of tech companies focused on creating interfaces for screens, many new design roles have emerged. Job titles like UX or UI designer are confusing to the uninitiated and unfamiliar even to designers who come from other industries.”
]]>An intelligent systems learns how to act to provide customer value through data, context, logic and behavior. Intelligent Systems are about people and making their lives better in such a profound way they can’t imagine going back to the old way.
Check it out via slideshare
]]>2. Select your team for who they know as well as what they know
3. Pick one leader and provide him or her the autonomy they need to be successful
4. Build a team that can both identify gaps in the market and markets in the gap!
5. Find team members who tell great stories!
6. Understand the difference between good and bad conflict
7. Supplement the innovation core team with an external provocateur
8. Remember to set goals and measure progress
9. Think like a startup entrepreneur
10. Ensure team members have “both feet in”
Extracted from Innovation Management article.
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The brilliant minds behind Chipotle’s haunting scarecrow ad
From The Week
]]>Just sharing a recent talk for the USAID funded Resilient Africa project on the Design for Delight and The Innovation Catalysts More about the project can be found at Resilient Africa Network
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