The ROI of User Experience with Dr. Susan Weinschenk
In this animated video Dr. Susan Weinschenk demonstrates how user centered design results in significant return on investment (ROI).
How Do You Transform Good Research Into Great Innovations?
Co.Design has published an essay wrote by Jon Kolko, the Executive Director of Design Strategy at Thinktiv, a venture accelerator in Austin, Texas. Jon Kolko gives tips to transform good research into great innovations. Actually, it’s pretty easy to get information, but the tricky part is to do a great synthesis in order to reuse what you collect during the research.
So, if you want to do so : get out of the laptop, identify and celebrate patterns and anomalies, and then, build a model of something, anything. Jon Kolko goes deeper in his book Exposing the magic of design : A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis.
Get Business Model Templates and Tools
A nice and simple tool to create successful business model by Board of Innovation.
Intuitive researches
Found on frogdesign blog, I am totally agreed with Michael DiTullo on his article « The Sartorialist: an example of intuitive research? ». It looks like the photographer Scott Schumann aka The Sartorialist captures a moment like designer’s doing field researches. The intuition leads his kind of research, and you never know what you will find.
Lisa Gansky: The Future is Sharing
Technology entrepreneur Lisa Gansky believes that the growing ubiquity of networked information and relationships are leading to what she calls a “mesh” economy of shared services and products. This “meshiness” not only rewards sharing over ownership, it is also fundamentally changing our relationship with things from product to experience.
A Product Is More Than the Product
« A product is actually a service. Although the designer, manufacturer, distributer, and seller may think it is a product, to the buyer, it offers a valuable service. The easiest example is the automatic teller machine (ATM), or as many people think of it, a cash dispenser. To the company that manufactures it as well as to the bank that purchases it, the ATM is a product. But to the customer, the ATM provides a service. » Don Norman
The Absent Peer – Non-users in Social Interaction Design
This research aims to provide a framework for the consideration of non-users in the context of social interaction design (SxD), in particular for the design of social network sites (SNSs). The theory of “The Absent Peer” consists of two core concepts, presenting the network aspect and the sociality aspect how non-use influences SNS concepts. Herein, the focus of the work is on the discovery of the impact of non-use rather than on its reasons.
I really invit you to discover this fantastic thesis of Sebastian Greger, a student from the Master of Arts programme in New Media at the School of Art and Design, Aalto University Helsinki.
Start local, scale global
For my end-study project, which is about « local » and « global », to not listen the famous sustainable sentence « Think global, act local ». I chose to « Start local, and then, scale global ». Why? Because, first, China is my playground, my lab, here I can try things and experiment. Second, when you think about it, it’s easier to think to something small in detail rather than something big in detail. Try to draw a desk, and try to draw an office. When you will draw the office, you will never think about all the detail of the desk. So, « Start local, scale global » will help me in my project to think about the whole experience.
Exchange my product with…
I have asked this question thanks to the form above, and people had to rank the answers which are: « the same product, but new », « the same product, but second-hand », « cash – money », « service which costs the same price », « a second-hand product more expensive » and « nothing ». There were three different kind of products: intimate (underwears), functionnal (hammer) and personal (watch).
Second-hand market interviews
I have interviewed people working in second-hand market in Qingdao. I wanted to know if people are used to come to this place and buy second-hand products, if they sell a lot, and what people think about second-hand products? And what they said surprised me! It seems that when people discover this second-hand market, they regret to buy new products. New products are fragil, expensive, … and sometimes toxic form the eyes of some Chinese consumers.
Paul Bennett, IDEO: Asking the right questions
What’s the answer? What’s the problem of the world and how we fix it? The answer is that, there is no answer. Now, it’s about asking questions.
Freemarket
I have tried an experimentation in street, to see if people could accept free products. My idea was to get information by observing and questionning them. So, I decided to build my own shop in the street, where I wanted to « sell » free products (read give products). I had help form a Chinese friend, because I didn’t want a foreigner effect on my shop, so I was a step backward. Read more
Original to copy
Groupon is a « deal-of-the-day » website that offers one « Groupon » per day in each of the cities it serves. If a certain number of people sign up for the offer, then the deal becomes available to all; if the predetermined minimum is not met, no one gets the deal that day. Lashou is basically, the same service translated in chinese, created by Chinese and for Chinese people.
IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Toolkit
I want to recommand you a great toolkit created by IDEO. This toolkit can help if you are interested in bringing innovation to the base of the pyramid, entering a new region, adapting a technology to your region, understanding the needs of constituents better or finding new methods for monitoring and evaluation. It’s open-source, and the advises and tips are really usefull.
You can download the complete HCD Toolkit and Field Guide free of charge.
Management project tools
I want to explain how I work on this project. Above, you can see my tasks list that allows me to see the tasks I have done everyday.
Mass Localism by Laura Bunt and Michael Harris
I want to recommend this paper that I have read today : Mass Localism. You can download it on the website of Nesta. Jonathan Kestenbaum, Chief Executive of Nesta, introduces this paper by saying that « the number of organisations exploring ingenious ways of supporting local solutions to big social challenges. This report sits within this wider movement and outlines our approach – an approach we call ‘mass localism’. »
In the part 2, the authors explains why localism works. They insist on the ‘scale-up’ local action, and on the communities : Small communities can help to tackle big social challenges, and then, can develop and implement new approaches locally, which can make them more effective (page 20 of the document). Finally, local groups can draw on existing social capital and motivate collective action. To sum-up, mass localism is about seeking distributed solutions to
problems and supporting communities to implement them.
If you want to know more about mass localism, go to Nesta’s website.
Three types of collaborative consumption
Product service systems enable companies to offer goods as a service rather than sell them as products. Goods that are privately owned can be shared or rented peer-to-peer. PSSs appeal to the increasing number of people shifting to a usage mind-set: They want the benefits of a product, but they don’t need to own the product outright.
In redistribution markets, used or preowned goods are moved from somewhere they are not needed to somewhere they are. In some markets, the goods may be free, as on Freecycle and Kashless. In others, the goods are swapped (as on thredUP and SwapTree) or sold for cash (as on eBay and craigslist). Over time, “redistribute” may become the fifth R—joining “reduce, reuse, recycle, and repair”—and a key form of sustainable commerce.
In collaborative lifestyles, people with similar needs or interests band together to share and exchange less-tangible assets such as time, space, skills, and money. These exchanges happen mostly on a local or neighborhood level, as people share working spaces (for example, on Citizen Space or Hub Culture), gardens (on SharedEarth or Landshare), or parking spots (on ParkatmyHouse). Collaborative lifestyle sharing happens on a global scale, too, through activities such as peer-to-peer lending (on platforms like Zopa and Lending Club) and the rapidly growing peer-to-peer travel (on Airbnb and Roomorama).
Collaborative consumption is not a niche trend, and it’s not a reactionary blip to the recession. It’s a socioeconomic groundswell that will transform the way companies think about their value propositions—and the way people fulfill their needs.
Source: Harvard Business Review
What’s mine is yours
A ‘Big Shift’ from the 20th century, a time defined by hyper-consumption, to a 21st century age of Collaborative Consumption, is underway.
Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities. collaborativeconsumption.com
It is the subject of a new book, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers.