We’ve been working hard towards organizing an interesting, relevant, and high impact Bangalore World Usability Day this year. I’m happy that BIAL put up a big ass 10 by 2 metres banner at the Bangalore Airport to announce the event.
The BIAL COO (and projected CEO) Mr. Marcel Hungerbuehler is speaking at the event and I’m looking forward to hearing their stories - as much as those of the Reva electric car, bus rapid transport systems in India and technology interventions in transportation.
Slideshare continues to be one of my favorite experiences on the web. They just released the results of the World’s Best Presentation Contest. Each one of the 3 finalists has created a visually compelling and thematically powerful slideshare presentation.Two of the presentations are on the Water crisis and the Zimbabwe crisis. A third is a lovely take on our very own two feet as seen by an intriguing travelista…
A few weeks back, I had an interesting discussion with Akhila Seetharaman, journalist with TimeOut Bangalore about the field of design and user experience and its relevance for our everyday life (including in Bangalore). We spoke about the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) Bangalore(which I head), the growth of the User Experience community in Bangalore in the past 5 years, good bad and ugly products and services and experiences in Bangalore, and the role design can play in improving all of these.
My friend Sarit Arora from Human Factors (also head of the ACM SIG on Human Computer Interaction and CHI Bangalore) also joined me for a morning chat with Akhila at the Indira Nagar Coffee Day. TimeOut recently published Akhila’s article - you can read the article on TimeOut’s website.
The article covers topics most of us are familar with: Globalization, the rise of the creative economy, the importance of design and story telling and how the design and User Experience field has evolved in India. It also lists products and experiences we’ve all struggled with or appreciated in India: kick-starting scooters, filling in paper forms, the Indian railways website, cleartrip.com and such.
This July, I finished reading two excellent sci-fi pieces – Rudy Rucker’sPostsingular and Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi graphic novel – Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. Both novels are freely downloadable from the above links. (Quite a stellar business model - fans like me are very likely to buy most of their books at some point).
Both books have been as refreshing as a splash of cold fresh spring water - made me feel how constrained my own vision of the future may have been. They also made me reflect on the smallness of the typical techno-utopian vision for the future shared by technologists and designers alike.
Postsingular is a novel breathtaking in its expanse of thought and scale of execution. You will find nano-scale intelligence and malintent, Californian street kids and geeks figuring out the Planck frontier, crossing between dimensions, futuristic interfaces and political marketing and a sweet twist on the traditional view of Nature and Gaia and post-human intelligence. I’m a fan and am waiting eagerly for Rucker’s next novel ‘Hylozoic’.
Norman & Nielson just finished 10 years in business. Though some in the User Experience and design community tend to be dismissive of their ‘expert-speak’, these folks have been a source of inspiration for many beginners in the field. Their work has been focused, consistent and in general, very useful.
I am busy with planning out Dcamp 2.0, the second edition of the Dcamp unconference series. After last year’s rather fun experience of organizing Dcamp 1.0 at the Yahoo campus in Bangalore, I’m looking forward to seeing newer topics and perspectives this year. This year, the folks at Aditi Technologies have been nice enough to provide ample event space in their Bangalore campus.
I am hoping to invite creatives from other fields to Dcamp as well – including from art, photography and film. If you know of any good folks I can send a Dcamp presentation invite to, please email me at pande dot amit at gmail dot com
Microsoft announced the launch of multi-touch technology with Windows 7 by 2010.
Its good to see that touch is generally becoming a more common form of interaction. Its time we got rid of the clunky keyboards and error-prone and mechanized voice recognition technology through some intuitive, instantaneous, responsive and almost-fluid Touch Interfaces.
Business Today recently released a BT-Monitor group study on India’s most ‘innovative’ companies. This is a timely study and it brings out some of the key areas in which Indian companies are innovating – unique distribution channels, customizations for first time consumers, lower cost product development, and in some cases, technology interventions.
However, I believe this study is incomplete and skewed because it fails to take into account two dimensions that are highly critical to innovation: Consumer Experience and Product/service differentiation through Design.
Consider similar lists released recently by Fortune and Business Week documenting the world’s most innovative companies.
Scanning across the names of the world’s top innovators what are the common threads you find? Is it simply low cost product development? (No- they all contract manufacture in China). Is it lower prices (No – companies like Whole Foods and Apple have significant markup)
No – what is truly common (or uncommon) to Apple, Whole Foods, Amazon, Starbucks and even once-stodgy technology giants like Cisco is their relentless pursuit to creating a compelling, integrated and delightful user experience for their end consumers. Not only how to streamline costs and operations but how to make their offerings resonate with customers’ deepest needs and desires.
Here’s how BW put it “Not so long ago, no conversation about innovation would be complete without the story of 3M inventor Art Fry’s eureka moment that led to the Post-it Note. Today, that tale, which verges on cliche, has been almost universally replaced by the story of the iPod, Apple’s omnipresent icon of design. It should come as little surprise, then, that Apple tops the BusinessWeek-Boston Consulting Group’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for the third year in a row. That sort of staying power speaks volumes about the sort of innovation that matters today. Unlike the Post-it Note, which proves the value of lone inventors, the iPod epitomizes today’s innovation sensibilities. These include the ascendance of design, the focus on the user’s experience, and the power of ecosystems….”
My conclusion – some if not many of the Indian firms that are being touted as ‘innovative’ as currently innovative simply because of a temporary cost benefit, a monopolistic market position, or deep pockets. These firms will struggle in years to come as Indian consumers and indeed global consumers become more and more demanding in the ‘experiences’ from these companies and their products and services.
Here is my pick of two sectors that may lose their ‘innovation’ edge unless they get their customer experience defined right, and soon.
1.Airlines – In this sector, consumer experience can range from frustrating to terrifying. Read some of the first hand accounts below on the rudeness, unprofessionalism and callousness of the service staff of some Indian airlines.
2.Banking – Untrained and unprofessional customer service reps, non-working ATMs over holiday weekends, long queues at bank centers, lousy ‘relationship managers’, spam calls – there is a litany of complaints against most Indian banks and the way they treat their customers.
To end things on a more positive note, I would say that the Telecom, FMCG and Automotive sectors have comparatively been showing much more initiative and maturity in defining good consumer experiences by optimizing the various touchpoints of the experience (pre-sales, sales, service, repeat sales). They also seem to have taken notice of the need for differentiating themselves based on design innovations (Think Swift and Scorpio, Airtel HelloTunes and mCheck payments, think Kurkure and Bingo)
Via Tom Stewart on the upcoming ISO 13407, a good article on the need to include the language of ‘user experience’ within existing usability standards. Mr. Stewart’s expansion to the ISO standard will define User Experience as ‘all aspects of the user’s experience when interacting with the product, service, environment or facility….a consequence of the presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behaviour, and assistive capabilities of the interactive system….all aspects of usability and desirability of a product, system or service from the user’s perspective’.
I particularly liked the reference to the Apple Store in the article. I’ve used the Apple store as an example of stellar Customer Experience (not just individual user experience) in several of my presentations. Apple did so many things right - they followed the golden role of rapid, iterative prototyping (under the vision of Mickey Drexler and the smarts of Steve Jobs), they hired passionate Apple enthusiasts instead of the sorts of run of the mill floor staff you find at Best Buy or Walmart and they kept ‘live’ (Wifi/music/video enabled) products you could play with (which Nokia’s concept stores do a pretty tacky job of as far as I’m concerned) for as long as you want. The Apple store is a brilliant component of the Apple experience ecosystem.
All in all, the broadening of the ISO usability standard to ‘User Experience’ is a step in the right direction - Apple illustrates how user experience driven products and services can lead to significant market innovation. I hope more companies can learn from them without blindly imitating them.
Is there a direct relationship between a company’s design investments and its stock market performance? Can PE firms and venture funds use such a relationship to select winners just as they use environment friendliness and carbon footprints?
The British Design Council which first came up with the ‘Design Index’ and ‘Emerging Index’ seems to think that there is. In a comprehensive study first released in 2005 (and updated in early 2008), they showed how an index of 61 top design-award winning companies had outperformed the FTSE by 200%.
The Design Council primarily used prestigious design awards (including by Interbrand). I think if someone wanted to take this research ahead, they could additionally look at:
-Media coverage of customer reactions to the ‘design’ or ‘user experience’ of the company’s products and services
-The company’s resource (human and infrastructure) investments in building core design competencies
-The company’s global footprint (in case of multinationals)
-The company’s history of using quantitative design and usability metrics to track improvements longitudinally
In these volatile financial times, I would be personally happy if someone could prove a ‘strong corelation’ between Design and stock market performance – at least then companies in India and China would ‘get’ the value of design and invest in building world class design teams and infrastructures.
