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

Above, the video is the redefinition of self-service banking by IDEO, which illustrates the example of the ATM.

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).

Then, I have created this visualization which helped me to analyse the result:
- People want to increase their values (don’t want to lose money)
- People are agreed to change for money because they aren’t stucked
- People are agreed to change their product with a new one, because it extends the product life