As a reader of this site I would like to invite you to join our presentation and experience the design process and the prototypes that our student design teams have developed for our corporate partners.

Our students and corporate partners

The course is based on the Stanford ME310 course that has been taught at Stanford University for more than 30 years and which has been adopted to meet the special environment and requirements at a business school. A team of students together with a corporate partner will work on a problem statement to develop a conceptual solution by following a methodology that focuses heavily on prototypes. This year’s corporate partners were BASF, Lonza and Swisscom and our students have spent the last 10 months to solve the given problem and come up with innovative solutions.

The project proposals

• BASF: Total Packaging Design for Printers
• Lonza: Harvest the creativity and the knowledge of the scientific community
• Swisscom: Services for Enabling Home Networking Adoption

The end of a exciting journey for this year’s class

At the final presentation the student teams are going to present their final conceptual prototype as well as the milestones that lead them to this prototype and the learnings and considerations that formed their decisions. Our students have been working long hours and many nights to find the most promising solution and they have once again shown the great results that a team of motivated student is able to achieve.

Join our presentations!

One month after the presentations and EXPE in Stanford, on Monday July 6th 2009 , the students will present their projects in St.Gallen. They will show their developed prototypes, insights, results as well as the design development process. After the presentation there will be an exhibition (EXPE) where visitors will be able to experience the different prototypes and talk to the student designers.

The event takes place at the University of St. Gallen in the Temporary Teaching Buildings (Lehrprovisorium, see campus map) on July 6^th. Reception starts at 12:00, presentations start at 12:30 and the exhibition is scheduled to start at 15:30. For detailed instructions please have a look at the campus map.

Please RSVP if you are planning to attend, you can reach me at bernhard@customer-experience-labs.com

Are users stupid?

The first reaction that one might get is that you should invest in educating people what a browser is (a piece software to navigate on the World Wide Web) and what options they have available (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and others). But maybe a better approach is to ask “Why don’t they know what a browser is?”.

Most users just don’t care

The reason why people don’t know what a browser is, is that they just don’t care about the browser. And why should they? People care about Facebook, Google and Yahoo but how to get to these websites doesn’t matter. And if you are not one of those that are heavily using some browser plug-ins you probably don’t see any differences in using different browsers.

Browsers are a commodity and a better browser is not enough

The key to understand the dynamics in this market is to understand that the available browsers are basically interchangeable because they are only marginal different. Of course there are differences in speed and compatibility but only power users who spend several hours working online can tell a difference - the majority of internet user can’t tell the difference.

The key to success is in creating a differentiated internet experiences

So if user don’t care about the how to get to Facebook and Google, how can you create a remarkable browser that people care about? The key is in re-inventing what it is that a browser does. Focusing on surfing the internet is not enough anymore. Opera is taking a step into this direction with Opera Unite which offers a wide range of additional services and functionalities to the traditional browser concept. It is too early to tell, if the Opera way of differentiation will be relevant to users, but the core idea is the right one – reinventing the browser.

How can we reinvent the browser?

I think it is still unbelievable that we are seeing such a strong growth of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter yet there seems to be no integration into existing browser. Instead there is a range of companies that are developing desktop applications that integrate into these services and provide a differentiated social networking experience.

It is time that these services get stronger integrated into existing web browsers and instead of bribing users to download the new Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft should work on a tighter integration of social networking and deliver a different experience of surfing the internet. Now they have a real use to justify their investment in Facebook.

The question is as well, whether we really need to reinvent the browser or if it will become obsolete? What if social networking clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic will see continuous growth in the future and will become the main entrance point for users when they access social networks? You think that is a crazy idea? Remember, only 8 percent know what a browser is.

How do you see the future of the browser and the future of people accessing the Internet? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

The tremendous growth that Twitter has experienced in the last months clearly shows that the service has traction and is increasingly attracting not just early adopters but also the average Internet user. Below you will find a comparison of traffic between twitter.com and cnn.com.

Since Twitter has a more open platform than Facebook, this increasing adoption opens up significant opportunities for businesses to tap into the online conversations of their customers and initiate micro-interactions with them.

Based on my close observation of Twitter (I wrote my first article about Twitter in March 2007), I have identified five use cases that demonstrate how businesses can use Twitter. Additionally, you can now follow the Customer Experience Labs on Twitter at   www.twitter.com/cxlabs.

The five use cases that I have identified are:

Voice of the Customer

When customers are talking, companies should listen, and while this has been difficult in the past, Twitter allows to listen to these conversations through various tools that allow to monitor online conversations. The easiest starting point is using Twitter search to search for conversations that include a certain term (i.e., your brand name). Popular brands such as Apple have a large volume of conversations, but there is probably somebody talking about your brand as well. Just open Twitter search, type in your brand name, and listen to the conversation. A more sophisticated tool for monitoring Twitter is monitter.com which allows to monitor three keywords at the same time.

Proactive Customer Service

After starting to listen to online conversations, the next step is to react to these conversations. While it is easy to say thanks to positive statements about your brand, a much higher impact is possible by providing proactive customer service when customer are complaining online. Here are some examples of customers complaining on Twitter:

AT&T…horrible service, not receiving e-mails on Blackberry, and their customer service is horrible. Oh well! Looking into verizon

I called Rogers customer service, couldn’t help me. Don’t even know if an existing customer can buy one at all, let alone price.

Intuit - What kind of customer service is that?

Acting on complaints like this on Twitter is extremely important because the nature of the system is to start conversations that in the case of complaints lead to negative word of mouth. Monitoring when customers express their negative experiences with a brand and initiating proactive customer service can restore customer satisfaction. All you need is to create a Twitter account, setup Twitter searches for relevant terms, and be ready to act when customers complain.

Recruitment

The social network and messaging features on Twitter not only allow to talk with customers but could also be used to find potential employees. Especially if you are working in a media or technology-related industry, Twitter provides an additional proactive recruitment channel and could help you find your next employee. Research In Motion, the company that develops the BlackBerry smartphone, has recently started to actively recruit employees via Twitter. Two recruiters tap into the conversations and try to identify potential candidates on Twitter. To get an impression of how this is done, you can take a look at @BB_Recruiter and @eloisewalsh and see how they publish job opportunities and interact with potential employees.

Customer Feedback

Once you have established a sufficient followership on Twitter, you can use this channel to collect instant feedback about new products, services, and ideas. Twitter allows you, through its nature of near real-time conversations, to collect instant feedback about your organization’s activities. Here is one example of a survey done by Gillette:

uncrate: Do us a solid and take this Gillette/Uncrate Answers survey http://bit.ly/MxrUo

Of course, this feedback doesn’t need to be collected openly as a Twitter conversation. Inviting customers to give feedback through a web-based survey tool like SurveyMonkey or Google Docs Forms has become really easy.

Viral Marketing

The social network features on Twitter provide a potential channel to build viral marketing campaigns. The essential point is NOT TO USE Twitter for your viral marketing campaign but to INTEGRATE Twitter into your viral marketing campaign. This means that a business should not just try to run a campaign and spread the word through Twitter but actually integrate Twitter as a channel in the campaign. If you are doing an online campaign, you can simply create a link through to Twitter with a link to Twitter that includes a certain message.

This can be done by creating a link to Twitter that includes the status update and looks like www.twitter.com/?status=Check out the Customer Experience Labs at www.customer-experience-labs.com. This presets a Twitter message and makes it easy to spread the word with your campaign. Once your campaign spreads on to Twitter and you have Twitter integrated as a campaign channel, your campaign is ready to go viral. An example is the integration of Twitter into the streaming music service grooveshark that allows listeners to share their music on Twitter. Below is a screenshot that shows the Twitter link in the lower left corner.

Some Companies that already use Twitter

The following Twitter users are companies or represent companies that use the service to interact with customers. All of them are confirmed; you can also find a complete list of major companies on Twitter.

BBC http://twitter.com/BBC

British Airways http://twitter.com/BritishAirways

Delta http://twitter.com/deltaairlines

Intuit QuickBase http://twitter.com/IntuitQuickBase

Siemens PLM Software http://twitter.com/SiemensPLM

Capgemini http://twitter.com/Capgemini

Honda http://twitter.com/Alicia_at_Honda

Vodafone Ireland http://twitter.com/VodafoneIreland

Vodafone Germany http://twitter.com/Vodafone_de

Getting Started

The steps to get active on Twitter are simple and can be done without much effort. Simply register on Twitter and you can start to follow other users. If you don’t want to start with your company’s brand name, you can simply use your own name to see how your use of Twitter evolves. If that works out well, you can switch to an account that represents your organization. Nevertheless, registering your company name now is a good idea to ensure that nobody else can use it.
Finding users to follow can be done through the integrated user search or by doing a Twitter search with your brand name and following the users who are talking about your brand. Additionally, you can set up the auto-follow functionality based on certain keywords through services like http://www.twollo.com/.

In order to work with Twitter efficiently, you can install a desktop client like TweetDeck, which offers a lot of functionality (i.e., user search, keyword search, URL shortening) and makes Twitter really easy to use.

Spread the word

If you like this article and find it helpful, I would appreciate it if you spread the word tweet about this article.

Not your typical student project

The cooperation with corporate partners gives students the opportunity to work on real-world problems while learning how to successfully run their own design and engineering consultancy. The results are definitely interesting and inspiring; the following video resulted from a project with Nokia in 2006/2007 which showcased the future of “Open Internet Communication Culture”.

Another great example is a prototype that was built in 2006/2007 that re-imagined the center-console of a car as a massive touch screen. Some pictures of the prototype, the Pangea Interface:

Too futuristic? Not really. In March 2009, a similar concept was introduced in the new Tesla Model S, the much anticipated electric car.

If you would like to have a glimpse at the future, you are invited to the join us at Stanfor Design EXPE09. More information and registration is available at http://expe.stanford.edu/The preliminary program for the day:HSG310: Design Thinking & Business Innovation, University of St. Gallen

• BASF: Total Packaging Design for Printers
• Lonza: Harvest the creativity and the knowledge of the scientific community
• Swisscom: Services for Enabling Home Networking Adoption

ME310: Project-Based Engineering Design, Innovation & Development

• AUDI AG: HMI 2020 in collaboration with TKK (Helsinki, Finland)
• Autodesk Inc.: Exploring the Opportunities for Collaboration between architects, manufacturers, and contractors in collaboration with UNAM (Mexico City, Mexico)
• Foundation of Finnish Security and Safety Industry Development: Intelligent Fall Protection in collaboration with TKK
• Naked Green: Leveling the playing field for Alternative Fuel Vehicles in collaboration with TKK
• Panasonic: Making Dental Care More Fun & Effective in collaboration with HPI (Potsdam, Germany)
• Panasonic: Supporting Social Bonds and Friendship with Wearable Technology in collaboration with PUJ (Cali, Colombia)
• Robert Bosch GmbH: A Sensor System for 3D Measurement and Reconstruction in collaboration with UNAM
• SAP AG (Germany): Innovating the Work@SAP Experience in collaboration with HPI
• Telefonica (Germany): Mobile Pursuit of Vital Signs in collaboration with PUJ

CS210: Project-Based Software Design, Innovation & Development

• Microsoft: Making satellite imagery available for climate modeling
• Yahoo!: Improving the Internet Search Experience
• Facebook: Making the Facebook platform a more viable option for the enterprise
• John Gardner Center: Identifying opportunities for and implementing software to improve after school programs for youth

As you can see, these student projects from around the world are definitely not your typical student project. A large part of my activities at the University of St. Gallen are around a course called “Design Thinking & Business Innovation” that we have setup in a cooperation between Prof. Larry Leifer, Director at the Stanford Center for Design Research and Prof. Walter Brenner, Director of Institute of Information Management. Our students will be there as well, presenting their conceptual prototypes

Let’s get in touch!

If you are planning to visit the Stanford Design EXPE please drop me an eMail at bernhard@customer-experience-labs.com . Together with Sushi Suzuki, Ph.D. student at the Stanford Center for Design Research, we would like to give you a behind the scenes look of the design research and teaching at Stanford University. You should also have a look at the new course website at http://me310.stanford.edu/

Bill Buxton

I highly recommend his talk to everyone who is involved in experience design (which are a lot of people even though they are not initially aware of it) because he clarifies once again what experience design is all about and shows practical examples with a focus on developing software applications.

I have summarized some statements of his talk below, the video of his talk is embedded below as well, enjoy it.

On experience design and the current economic situation

You couldn’t be in a better profession in the current economic climate because by getting the experience right you get this return on investment which will not you let survive but drive economic development.

On the novelty of experience design

Is experience just a new name? Same old stuff in new clothes? No, it’s a refocus of attention, it is what successful products always had but we never called it that.

Industrial designers very often talk about the things but when it’s actually the experience that is induced by this thing that is the true product of you. It’s not the screen, it’s not the graphics - it’s what they prompt.

On the focus of experience design

Any product, service, online thing or object you make - you have to know what is the nature of the grin, or the adrenalin or the smile or the love that you are trying to provoke from your users.

For a better viewing experience you can use the full screen feature or watch the talk at the MIX09 website.

I am sure that in the next 18 – 36 months we will increasingly see that large corporations use the web to drive down costs for customer service  while at the same providing the same or an even improved customer service experience.

One approach to provide online customer service are online communities. These have emerged around companies and their products together with discussion forums have long been a source for customers to get answers to their questions without the need to interact with the company directly.

One example is crackberry.com, an independent site about the BlackBerry smartphone that has already 30% of the visitors that the original Blackberry.com site has (see compete.com statistics). From my own experience the crackberry.com forum is a really valuable and helpful source for customer service.

While many of these sites are independent and do not represent an organization, companies increasingly understand the potential of online communities to offer customer service. 

The New York Times has published an article titled “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” which explains the story, motivation and success factors of a online community for customer services that has been created by Verizon.

Mr. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service.

[…] Verizon needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

There is also a statement from Verizon about the success of the experiment.

At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

Read the full article “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” in the New York Times.

His view of the scope of design reflects the motivation for this collection.

This collection is highly valuable because it helps to reflect how we are solving problems and how we might achieve different outcomes by adopting and following different processes.

You can find more information at the DDO website or download the book as a PDF directly.

An article in the Wall Street Journal from September 2008 titled “Making the Most of Customer Complaints” from Prof. Stefan Michel, IMD Lausanne, David Bowen, Thunderbird School of Global Management and Robert Johnston, Warwick Business School summarizes challenges and strategies to ensure the successful management of customer complaints.

Here is an excerpt:

Nobody’s perfect. That’s a fact, not an excuse. Which is why it’s crucial for companies to realize that the way they handle customer complaints is every bit as important as trying to provide great service in the first place. Because things happen.

Customers are constantly judging companies for service failures large and small, from a glitch-ridden business-software program to a hamburger served cold. They judge the company first on how it handles the problem, then on its willingness to make sure similar problems don’t happen in the future. And they are far less forgiving when it comes to the latter. Fixing breakdowns in service — we call this service recovery — has enormous impact on customer satisfaction, repeat business, and, ultimately, profits and growth.

But unfortunately, most companies limit service recovery to the staff who deal directly with customers. All too often, companies have customer service sort out the immediate problem, offer an apology or some compensation, and then assume all is well. This approach is particularly damaging because it does nothing to address the underlying problem, practically guaranteeing similar failures and complaints.

Read the full article “Making the Most of Customer Complaints”.

How would the focus in your organization change, if your corporate vocabulary is dominated by words and associations from either competitors, shareholder value or customers? If you talk about your customers all the time, your focus tends to shift on customers and through this you could take a big step in getting closer to your customers.

With this in mind it is interesting to see a blog post by Ian Sefferman, a former Amazon employee, about the use of the word customer experience at Amazon.

Customer obsession is the single most important asset you can have as a company.

Every second of every day you should be able to know exactly why you are working on whatever it is you are working on and how that helps the customer. What about it makes their life easier and their experience with your company better?

I worked as a software developer on the Email Platform team. That meant, among other things, we were responsible for sending massive amounts of marketing and transactional mail to customers. Obviously, not all customers find this to be the greatest experience, so it was particularly important for our team to ensure that we did not send spam, and we targeted each mail directly to those customers who would be interested in receiving the mail. The words “customer experience” were perhaps two of the most uttered words on our team each and every day.

The implications for your business

Reflecting on your corporate vocabulary and how it is used could provide valuable insights about the real focus in your organization. Is your organization focused on itself and communication is mostly about your organization, its products, management and processes or do you focus on the customer and actually mirror this in your language? Is your organization’s vocabulary focused on preserving the status quo or on shaping the future? If you want to change your corporate culture, how would you need to change the language that is used in your organization?

Research Potential

I think it would be very interesting to do a analysis of documents, emails and other communication in an organization to identify the degree of customer orientation and customer focus. Doing this with a longitudinal analysis one might get an interesting measurement tool about change within an organization.

In the following article I want to focus especially on the area of ecological sustainability and sustainability is used synonymously for economic sustainability.

Sustainability has received a lot of attention in recent years and the role of sustainability in business and design is a heavily discussed topic. While I certainly agree that it is the right thing to follow principles that ensure economic, social and ecological sustainability, I am less convinced about the value “sustainable products” offer to customers.

But if sustainability doesn’t offer value, why is there a need for electronic cars? And why do consumers pay organizations to offset their carbon footprint? I think this has nothing to do with the value that “sustainability” offers but is instead motivated by other reasons. I would like to discuss a few observations that I have made and the consequences these observations have for marketers.

In search of substitutes

The recent interest in electric cars is not driven by an increased demand for sustainable, electric cars but actually because of souring prices for oil. Consumers are looking for cars that use something else than oil and found it in hybrid and electric cars.

The same holds true for other products where paper packaging is used instead of plastic packaging as well as the so called cradle-to-cradle design, where you focus on designing your products with the whole product lifecycle (including  recycling) in mind.

All these decisions are driven by consumers (and designers) who are looking for substitutes to reduce the high costs of current solutions.

Your peace of mind

Another driver for an increased demand for sustainable products is guilt. It has become en vogue to look down on people who drive a SUV and to feel guilty whenever you do something that is not environmentally friendly. This has gone so far that people have started not only to calculate their carbon footprint, but also pay someone to offset their carbon footprint through investments in economically friendly initiatives.

Whenever I book a flight on a German travel site it induces guilt by telling me how much carbon dioxide I will create with this flight. Luckily I have an option to pay someone to make up for my environmentally unfriendliness which so far I have chosen not to use due to my personal concerns about this “donation schemes”. These donation systems are already the reason for official warnings from the U.S. government about scams to offset your carbon footprint but this is whole different story.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with using guilt to stimulate a certain consumer behavior and make people buy your products. Yet at the end of the day, it is guilt and the corresponding need for having “peace of mind” that is driving the decision of consumers and not the intrinsic need for a “sustainable product”.

Sustainability becomes a hygienic factor, but not a differentiating factor

If sustainability does not provide any (functional) value to consumers itself, one might ask why more and more companies are changing their marketing message to incorporate aspects of sustainability? There are certain interest groups that use the current environment to push their interest and their messages and they pick rather popular targets. Apple has created a special section on its homepage about the ecological aspects of its products as a result of a public criticism from Greenpeace in 2006 about toxic materials in its products.

This is also the reason that it becomes a necessity for companies in the current zeitgeist to ensure and communicate all aspects of their sustainability initiatives in order to prevent to become a publicly criticized for unsustainable practices. But just when every product and company is “sustainable”, sustainability itself becomes a commodity, a hygienic factor and is not a differentiating factor anymore.

The role of sustainability to create customer value

With sustainability not being a differentiator itself and due to the lack of customer value that is created through sustainability, one might ask what the role of sustainability can be in product and service design? From a theoretical perspective the task is to turn the value of sustainability from a symbolic, emotional value created by ecological aspects into functional value of the core product. IDEO’s Diego Rodriguez calls it “turning green into red”, designing green cars so they full of passion and delight.

I have written about the Tesla Roadster, a fully electric car that is a great example about this. Tesla has continued this “process of turning green into red” with their latest car, the Tesla S Sedan, which has received praise all over the media for it’s revolutionary design that doesn’t reflect that the car is an electric car. Here is one picture, you can find more pictures online.

The implications for your business?

So is design for sustainability the wrong approach? Not, it isn’t and designers and engineers should indeed focus on it. But one has to remember that the value proposition to the customer is essential and business should not focus on product characteristics that leave the customer’s needs and motivation out of the equation. A “sustainable product” alone doesn’t solve a customer problem, except that it make him feel less guilty and could help him save costs.

If businesses are serious about designing sustainable products, they need to translate sustainability into features that offer customer value and are not just providing peace of mind. And if you are designing a substitute product, then position it as substitute product and help consumer safe money.

The goal should be to design a product that sells not because consumers want a sustainable product, but because consumers want the product and don’t care that it is sustainable. Only then we have achieved a true change towards an ecologically sustainable society.

Images courtesy of [xotoko], [vgm8383] and Jalopnik