innovation playground Idris Mootee

When Wal-Mart Enters The Funeral Industry, The Business Is About To Change. Will Amazon.com Follow? What's The Latest Innovation In The Funeral Busines?

Some survey stated that the average person's greatest fear is having to give a speech in public. That’s not for me but I am sure for many. I remember one guy told he when he was put on stage in front of 800 people, the dead silence was like death. Giving a speech in public ranked even higher than death which was third on the list. So, you're telling me that at a funeral, most people would rather be the guy in the coffin than have to stand up and give a eulogy.

The first baby boomers are entering their mid-60s, and the death rate in the U.S. is expected to rise from 8.1 people per thousand in 2006 to 9.3 in 2020 (according to the National Center for Health Statistics). Yet the traditional funeral industry is hardly healthy: The Federated Funeral Directors of America, an accounting firm for independently owned funeral homes, found that in the past 20 years, its clients' profit margins have been cut nearly in half. Some 44% of funeral home directors, up from 28% in 2006, blame the increasing popularity of cremations and alternative burials for sinking profits. Some funeral homes have responded by more innovation such as themed funerals, from backyard barbecues to mini concerts.

The 11 billion industry is forced to innovate when Wal-mart enters the business. Wal-mart has started selling coffins online at prices that undercut many funeral homes. People can choose from 14 different ones, from the $895 "Dad Remembered" steel model, to the exclusive "Sienna Bronze" one for $2,899. Why did Wal-mart decide to enter the coffin market? Well, in fact this is a response to Costco’s move to sell coffin online (not in bulk thank God) with delivery within 24 hours. I guess people don’t want to wait for this category. I think it is a good idea. Funeral homes industry is overcharging and often people don’t know what these things should cost. With Wal-mart you need only to pay $1,000 versus 3 or 4 times more through a funeral home.

The funeral homes industry has reason to be concerned. I am sure their argument is these funeral homes can provide full service (like gas station) and ability to provide comfort and empathy, but it comes at a price. If it works for Wal-mart, the next one to join would be Target. They would invite Stella McCartney or Phillipe Starke to design caskets that costs just a little more, but with a lot more style. Amazon.com will follow with online customization that you can pick your favorite patterns or engraved your family crest on it. And for those creative types who are big thing art lovers, forget the traditional wooden box, you want something very special. A company called Crazy Coffins can pretty much order any design you want. There isn't a lot they can’t make. The bespoke coffins are made by two carpenters and costs between $3,00 to $10,000 (£2,000 and £6,000).

And when you decide to spend more on a coffin, may be you should consider an upgrade to Louis Vuitton or Karl Lagerfeld. And for those die hard rock fans , they used to sell a KISS goodbye with the "Kiss Kasket". It is decorated with the logo and pictures of the band members; plus: it is waterproof. The Kiss Kasket went on sale in 2001 until 2006 and now it's no longer available from Kiss' website. I’d like to see a Beatles one.

Your Next Electric BMW May Not Come With Any Sound. Need To Pay For Separately Dowloadable "Autotone".

Many years ago people did not realize the power of the ringtone. Not only they can make money selling them but it is a powerful political tool. I think the Philippines was the first country in the world to use text messaging to topple a former president, they may soon be the first country to overturn a government with a ringtone. Imagine the power of the voice on poll tape and ringtone. What about the Obama ringtone?

The BBC World Service Trust understands the power of the ringtone to achieve development goals. When they were tasked with the tough task to make condoms more acceptable, and free from negative judgment, they came up with a wacky idea to get people talking about condoms -- a condom-themed ringtone. World Service Trust Condom Ringtone was the solution. They hope that this will stimulate conversation, which is desirable as - according to research - those who talk about sex and condoms are more likely to have safer behaviors

Or do you know about the mosquito ringtone for teenager that allows teenagers to receive text messages and phone calls in class without the teachers hearing them. In case you didn’t know, it’s a tone outside the audible range of hearing for most people over the age of 30. You probably don’t know this, the history of the mosquito ring tone dates back to 2005 when a British inventor by the name of Howard Stapleton came up with an ingenious idea to drive away teens through ultra high frequency sounds much like how a dog whistle would affect dogs. It was an idea to make the storefront very uncomfortable for the loitering teens while leaving the money spending adult customers unaffected.

So what’s next for ringtone? Here another innovation for the auto makers to make money. How about “autotones” for your car? If you live in New York City or Toronto you will often encounter bike messengers speeding pass you just a few inches away. The problem is you don’t know they are coming because there aren’t making any sound. When electric cars eventually get popular, the same problem will arise. Because they are so quiet, it can be dangerous if you are crossing the street and couldn’t hear them. Those hyrids need to figure out how to make the cars nosier.

Many have started working with sound engineers to design sound effects to simulate engine noises. The Fisker Karma, an $87,900 plug-in hybrid expected to be in the market soon, will emit a sound -- pumped out of power sub-woofers in the bumpers -- that the company founder, Henrik Fisker, describes as "a cross between a starship and a Formula One car. I believe at one point they will get creative and designing unique noises to differentiate their brands. There will be Mercedes, Porsche and BMW noises.

Buying an electric car in 2012 you will need to pick from the price list what “Vroomtone” or “autotone” package that you may want to include (for a price). Or you can buy a subscription package that you can have unlimited download of all “autotone” for your car for a year. Pick something for the locking of the cars, or another for engine noises or when the charge is ready etc. May be the automakers end up making more money from these “autotone” that the car itself.

Have a great weekend and off to Boston.

"Elegant" Is Often Reserved For Use In The High Design World. So What Does It Mean For Engineering, Interface Or Business Models? Can Business Learn From This Design Principle?

El·e·gant, an adjective and define or characterized by or exhibiting refined, tasteful beauty of manner, form, or style. Mark Jacob? Chanel? Jil Saunder? Hermes? All are elegant by design. What about Amazon Kindle? Apple iPhone? Or GE? Or P&G? Are they elegant? It is word reserved for the design world. That world likes to use words such as “elegant”, “simple” and “user friendly”, many designers understand how to subtract in creating simple and elegant design solutions. Human factors usually subtract more than add. Good designers take away complexity in objects or interfaces. Can business learn from this design  principle? Can a business strategy be “elegant”? Or can a particular management style be described as “elegant”?

Anything elegant is often simple; not everything simple is elegant. Everything simple is often user friendly, not everything simple is user friendly. Sometimes complexity us needed. Simplicity has different meanings. Good businesses need to be simple and easy to understand, and that’s the investment criteria for Warren Buffet. Business are getting too complex these days and most executives let alone the CEO knows all the moving pieces and have any idea of their risk exposure. And some rely on SAP to manage the enterprise and that’s unrealistic. 

There are many different kinds of simplicity, sometimes in form and sometimes in function or both. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Elegance is “far side” simplicity that is emotionally engaging, profoundly intelligent, and artfully crafted to be two things at once: simple and powerful. Why elegance? Is it an elusive target? Does it only applicable to design?

Are there always simple answers to even the most wicked problems? Do we have to reduce complexity so we can understand it or do we need complex solutions to solve complex problems?  Scientists, engineers, mathematicians, system thinkers, economists research for theories hoping to explain highly complex phenomena in simple ways.

Business executives and strategists are dealing with more and more complex business models. I don’t think that a simpler solution is necessarily superior than a complex one. If you consider a particular business as a system, the business model corresponds pretty exactly to the function of that system. The business in operation is a combination of architecture, function and performance. As with many complex systems, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between the three.

A business model includes the raw function of what we (economist) refer to as its "industry" (it's a bank or a retail chain or a newspaper, for example), but can also include particular ways of operating the raw function (a branchless bank or low-cost airline, a discount retailer or free online social network, for example). Thus the business model "function" can shade into "performance" when particular approaches to types of customer, levels of service and brand ethos are considered. The architectural side of the business model is how the core components are stack together and that impacts the function as well as the performance. It can be simple and elegant, and can be complex and elegant.

Elegant doesn’t have to simple.

What Are Next Big Innovations For Personal Banking? Yes, The Current Customer Experiences In General Are Pretty Bad.

What are the next disruptions for personal financial services? Are they ready for a full “reset” ? Can they develop new perspectives fast enough and overcome their dogmas? How do we inject out-of-the box thinking and make them work within-the-box? Or can we re-shape the box? The last 6 weeks, we’ve been focusing some of the most interesting paradigm shifting ideas of how to transform banking, insurance and healthcare. Back to personal banking, there are so many opportunities for innovation.

Here’s one interesting one. iPhone check deposit. The military bank and insurance provider USAA recently launched mobile check-deposit technology, which lets users deposit checks from anywhere using an iPhone. USAA customers take photos of both sides of a check with the phone and transmit the images to the bank, which then verifies and makes the deposit.

The bank has just one branch in San Antonio and, because of its military legacy, has customers in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is so cool because it integrates with existing checking habits. It is reported that USAA has deposit growth nearly triple the industry average over the past three years. Further, 17% of all its customers across investing, insurance and banking use USAA's mobile app, which also facilitates on-phone trading, filing claims for auto accidents, loan calculations and the usual access to account information.

The future of banking is mBanking. The phone will become your wallet (contactless payments), your branch (for deposit) and your credit card. Just don’t lose it. We’re prototyping a number of cool mobile wallet and developing scenarios how they would fit it into a social-media culture. And what it means for SMEs etc.

Nokia will be a big player and could use P2P payments as an entry-point to emerging markets -- and a new revenue stream. It's partnered with Redwood City, Calif.-based Obopay to launch Nokia Money, a service that lets users make financial transactions on their phones. With Nokia Money, which will start to roll out in 2010 in undisclosed markets, mobile users can send money to other mobile users, pay merchants and utility bills, or top up prepaid cellphone minutes. I think more will join. We will end up having Nokia Money, iPhone Dollars, Tata Rupees, Ericsson Krona. Then we will need another kind of currency exchange.

Applying Design Thinking In Spirituality. Let's Call It "Faith-Based Innovation"? From Kosher Design To Halah Music.

My first thought these two things don’t quite go together and that not necessarily have tot be the case. Religions have always used symbols and colors as part of the design. Take Buddhism as an example, the color red symbolizes lifeforce, preservation, fire, and sacred things or places. Also riddled with duality, fire can represent warmth and comfort, but can also be a destructive force.

Red is associated with the Buddha Amitabha. Throughout Tibetan culture, red is a marker of sacred areas, and a true mark of a Buddhist scared area are the simplistic, tall gates at the entrances. That’s the color that the monks are wearing. It is believed to be a protective color, like that of shamanistic wards. Green denotes youth, vigor, action (Karma), and harmony. Because it is the color at the middle of the spectrum, it is also represents balance and is associated visually with the lush trees. 

And the most important color for them is yellow. Yellow is the color that possesses the highest symbolic quality because of the saffron color of the monks' robes. It was chosen as a symbol of humility and separation from materialistic society. It symbolizes renunciation and desirelessness. That’s a lot of design thinking here.

Imagine a suite of “service design” offerings designed around electronic gadgets, let’s call it  "faith-on-demand", we are talking abut creative religious practice tailored to the lifestyles and needs of individuals who prefer modern than traditional taste. There are lots of innovation opportunities if we start interweaving traditional faith practices more tightly into the texture of daily life. What is the iTunes of faith looks like?

There have always a large number of not-so-well designed religious products out there designed explicitly for Christians, Buddhists, Jews and Muslims, and despite a thriving literature within visual culture studies that examines how religion happens materially. Design critics do not often write about the ways in which religion informs the design and use of products, and how the design and use of products in turn shapes religious  practice.

In 2006 I.D. magazine ran a special issue titled  "Design and Religion:  New Forms for Faith” featured Jewish products and on houses of worship, an "Islamic cell phone” and a prayer rug whose pattern illuminated when oriented to Mecca. We have not seen any serious commercialization of these products. It is interesting if we start thinking about religion and interface.

Apply design thinking in religions can result in a lot of new faith-based innovation. I define this as products/experiences that engage faith in a modern, social and practical manner by facilitating religious practices.  If we apply a little imagination and human factors thinking in traditional religious objects such as rosaries and crucifixes, prayer rugs, menorahs, and censers we can come up with lot of innovation ideas. Technology + Faith = Tons of untapped opportunities and customer unmet needs.

Easter Day Random Thoughts On Emotional Design And Sustainability.

Easter as an important holiday for many is the result of many different cultures and religions. The history of the Easter basket has a similar lineage. Some of the origins are from ancient pagan customs, some stem from a Judeo Christian background. For many kids, it is about Easter eggs.

Vernal or spring equinox was special time to ancient cultures. It is a time when day and night are equal time. This was a signal that the long winter was finally over and that spring a time of renewal and rebirth. Cultures from the Middle East such as the Hebrews, Arabs, Babylonians, and Assyrians had special traditions such as bringing the first seedling of the new crop to the temples to be blessed. This was in the hope that God would be happy and bless their crops that year. For Christians, you must give up something and fast until after Easter.

Consumers are not cutting back to save money on their chocolate Easter eggs. Many candy stores report business is booming this Easter season. Many consumers admitted with the tough economy everyone is cutting back on spending, but not on chocolate or candy. This is a good example of how "affordable luxury" is  a bright spot and smart marketers understand how to leverage this opportunity to get close to consumers. To sustain themselves, luxury goods will be hard pressed to come up with innovative ideas to maintain their presence by providing little treats that people can afford to buy until the economy turns itself around. The key is to maintain emotional connections and not become relevant. It is easy to be irrelevant for many high priced brands. Consumer feel abandoned by luxury brands when they feel they cannot afford them anymore. This is tricky for marketers as they try to uphold their brand image and at the same time cannot afford to disassociate themselves with their customers.

The art of creating or maintaining emotional relationships with brands/objects is not something you can do effectively with advertising if you can do that at all, doesn’t matter how many millions you spend and what you throw into the media mix. Now this guy gets it. William Warren, who runs a furniture and product design consultancy in the UK and also a Senior Lecturer at London Met University. He initiated a project to further explore ideas of built-in sentimentality within our possessions. The aim is to make stronger emotional relationships with our belongings and encourage life-long use.

I really like the idea of life-long use as opposed to our use-and-discard economy which creates a lot of sustainability challenge. He designed some shelves that are available in oak veneered plywood built-to-order to whatever customer’s measurements. They are intended to be used throughout life as storage for personal belongings. The best part is, upon death, the shelves can be easily dismantled and rebuilt as a coffin. A clever idea indeed.

A Great Sauce Can't Save A Lousy Pasta Just As Great Advertising Cannot Save A Lousy Product Or Brand. Microsoft Is Spending $100mm To Market Its Search. It Better Be A Good Product.

A great sauce can't save a lousy pasta just as great advertising cannot save a lousy product or brand. We should all start with a good product/experience.

Microsoft has just hired JWT for the launch of a new search product. Annualized account billings are estimated at US$100 million and initial media spending will be around $40 million. Microsoft plans to launch the ad effort this summer. OK wait a second, is this a branding problem? I can imagine how the market research is telling them that people don’t think Microsoft as a search company, fair enough. But that doesn’t mean you should just go out and spend a 100 million bucks and that problem will go away. Microsoft is not a search company. Period. Who are you kidding? It is not that the Microsoft brand is bad, it is a powerful brand in many ways, but it needs to rethink its search strategy.

Google has become synonymous with search and that has made it virtually impossible for anyone trying to take on the space. And clearly Microsoft hasn't helped its case by pitching its search and online properties under a host of different brand names. Google owns ‘search’ as much as Microsoft owns ‘office’, I don’t see Goggle spending millions marketing their ‘office’ suite brand. Microsoft does have a branding problem, but it is not search, it needs brand architecture.

But Microsoft has been throwing money at the search game for years now and not yielding any results. I was working very closely with a ‘search’ client of mine for a while and since then there’s only evolutionary change. No one comes close to challenge Google. Now Yahoo is almost out of the picture. I have not seen any leapfrog thinking, things like Live Search Cashback and others didn’t really work. They need a breakthrough idea, before they think branding. Twitter?

Twitter is rolling out its integrated search and trends into the web platform (not sure if this is dressing up for sale thing). They had been testing it for quite a while. Twitter purchased Summize last summer, it has been keeping search and trends separate from the messaging platform until now.  Sure the long term view is to integrate the two. Twitter needs to go mainstream and create new features, search is one of them.

For Microsoft, not only they need to have differentiated features for the search product, they also need a brand. I don’t mean a logo or tagline or an ad. I mean a good user experience. The UX is the brand. Not the advertising. The way users feel about their experience is inseparable from the way they feel about your brand. Let's hope that the Microsof search product is so good that it justify the advertising investments. Well, with $100mm, you have a pretty good chance to develop a great search product just in case this one fails.

Have a great long weekend.

Gmail Gets 'Undo'. We Can Use More 'Undo' Functions In Many Of The Problems We Created. It's TIme For Marketers To Learn From Human Factor Specialists.

Most mistakes are caused by human errors, Google user experience team understands this well and last week announced the launching of a Gmail Labs feature called "Undo Send," that lets users abort the sending of any Gmail message--if you use it within 5 seconds. Undo Send lets you snatch an email back before it gets sent out. Not sure it allows user to increase what’s the lag period, I think 2 minutes works for me better.

Other error forgiving features already available include Gmail's capability to watch for words like "attached" in the body of an e-mail and to check you if you’ve actually included the your attachment; and a feature in Google Apps (the corporate version of Gmail) that puts orange borders around the names of e-mail recipients that are not inside your company--to alert you to not send confidential information where you shouldn't. This is definitely useful as we often made mistakes of sending it to the wrong person because of auto-fill address.

I think the next enhancement should be scanning for “words” that show strong negative emotions as we know we often regret what we said when we were angry. So the feature will hold your email for 15 minutes and ask you if you really want to change these words or suggest some alternatives.

I think the notion of  ”undo” is a very interesting one, lawyers understand this notion very well when they write contracts. There are so many decisions in our everyday life that we wish we could ‘undo’.  How often we press the wrong button while we configure a new device and we have to start over again or worst got stuck because there’s no way out. We (humans) are both the strongest and weakest variable in any complex system. The strongest because we are versatile, adaptable, learning beings equipped with the most advanced and fuzzy-logic computer—our brains. The weakest because along with our adaptability is our variability. For the same reasons that even extensive planning, we also err in many situations where we have never erred before. Just look at our current mess in the financial system.

We are often reminder that human errors cannot be avoided. And all too often human error is an explanation, it is never a solution, yet we most often go forward shaking our heads at the sad but inevitable fallibility of people or, better yet, with a deceptively comforting bandage fix and a promise that it will never happen again. Bandage after bandage, eventually they begin to wear out and the vivid lesson grows dim with time, and we set ourselves up for another error. Overtime these errors pile up to point until it becomes system failure.

The whole idea of human factor is to address human weaknesses while facilitating human strengths.  Human factor is not just making better switches and safer devices; it is about compensating for human errors.  And if possible allow us to undo our mistakes. Forgiving user experiences are not easy to come up these days. The world can use more human factor specialists.

Imagine a group of human factor specialist sitting together and rethink the following three things:

Undoing Credit Card Purchases. From how we shop and how we much we decide to pay for each statement period. They could easily come up with dozens of way to “undo” our mistakes. I think many people can use an “undo” function in shopping with a credit card. Lots of untapped innovation opportunities here.

Undoing Voicemail. Can you imagine if we could simply go back and change the voice mail we left before they pick up the message? How often you wished you’d done a better job when you left a message for a future employer, prospect or ex-girlfriends? How come no one thought of that feature?

Undoing Marriage. There must be a better way to “undo” this than divorce. Human Factor folks will find better solutions than the lawyers. The Google idea may be applicable here, how about 60 days lag period that allows either side to opt out?

On Customer Empathy: A Tale Of Two Customer Experiences. Apple Versus HP. HP Is The Gold Standard.

Continuing on the subject of empathy, Empathy is key in customer service and it’s not something you can embed in a script or redesign process flow to make it happen.  Especially in call centers, medical services, technical support, hospitality — places where expectations are high and people feel vulnerable … those are the place we need applied empathy to convey to the customer that they understand them and truly care to help resolve their issues. Not reading from a script. 

Almost everyone has the ability to empathize. It’s just easier not to. It’s easier to rely on the script so you don’t have to involve yourself. But until you do just that, the customer perceives your service as inauthentic, unfeeling, uncaring. I suspect over 95% of our daily interactions with customer service people are like that, the other 5% truly sets the gold standard in customer service beyond processes.

Here’s a story in point. I was having a few problems with my Macbook Air for a few months, only recently I had to send it in because the hinge actually broke in additional to audio issues. So my EA brought it after making an appointment, the technician said that the broken hinge was not covered under the warranty and it was damaged due to user’s fault. I asked him to show me any signs of physical damage if it was caused by an external force. He repeated what he said and asked me to call Apple if I wasn’t happy with his conclusion. I asked him to take pictures of it and make sure the person I called understand the case.

A few days later, I called Apple Care and after talking to an AppleCare agent, a product specialist and then transferred to someone in California, she told me could not find any pictures. So she called the store, located the picture and read the notes. The notes said there were many scratches on the cover. I asked them what does scratches have anything to do with the issue. They said nothing. 3 hours into the call, she finally came to a conclusion that the damage was not caused by the user (that''s me) but classified as unexplained accident, whatever it means. She offered to share the replacement cost.  It was not only an uncaring experience, it shows hot broken the system is.  I am paying an extra $250 plus for AppleCare and this is what I am  getting. I wasn't happy because clearly there's a manufacturing problem here.  AppleCare doesn’t really care. That's my experience.

The same week, my son’s HP laptop was more than a year old and last week its logic board blew and translation…you might as well buy a new one than replacing the it. I asked him to call HP anyway. When I came home later that night, he told me the HP service was so helpful and they had agreed to replace it even it is out of warranty. It is a known issue. It was disruptive for my son since he loaded the machine with tons of applications, he still needs to back up all the files but he wasn’t upset because HP promised to fix the problem. The box arrived the next day for him to ship the machine back. He is telling him his next laptop is a HP.

When I went to work the next day, my colleague Nick was telling me how happy he was with HP.  Two weeks ago his HP Pavilion Notebook died...which is not the good part of the story.  Here’s his story. He called their 1-800 # and was talking with a real life person within 20 seconds of calling...a welcome surprise.  As an added bonus he was engaging and helpful. 

They walked him through a couple of steps to see if there was a quick fix, which there wasn't.  They then acknowledged that it was out of warranty and my Pavilion was not part of any recall...but that HP would fix the problem anyway.  They walked him through the whole process, including suggesting to back up the hard drive.

The next day an UPS box arrived for Nick to send back the laptop. He received emails at every stage of the repair and shipment.  Two days after the email telling him it had shipped, he received his laptop back (with the Hard Drive still working)...fixed and as good as new.  Apparently the problem was with the motherboard. For Nick, this experience pretty much guarantees that his next personal computer will be an HP.

Back to my story, I ended up going into a Mac Store and bought a new MacBook Air, Time Machine is great, in 3 hrs I am up and running.  A problem occurred when I try to use my HP printer at home, so I had to call HP. A friendly voice on the other side told me my warranty for the printer has expired, but I might have the date wrong and he could help me to correct it.  He then spent 30mins helping to get it to work. Half an hour later, we still couldn’t figure out why but he tried everything. Strangely I was not upset and in fact I felt sorry that he wasn’t able to help. Next day I went out and buy another HP printer. They deserve my business.

What’s the difference between Apple Care and HP? When handling strong emotion or frustrated customers empathy is key, Apple failed the test. I was a stressed out customers in a desperate situation. Unless one can convey the customer that he/she completely gets what’s going on and feel for them in an authentic way they will never feel satisfied. Even sometimes they may not be in a position to help. To be heard, respected is step one. Nothing else but empathy can immediately deflate an angry customer, and be a release valve in highly charged situations. Empathy is not a “nice-to-have;” it is a must in building strong customer relationship. Many companies don't get it.

An article in the most recent issue of HBR “When Should a Process Be Art, Not Science?” by Joseph M. Hall and M. Eric Johnson highlights many of these challenges.  The idea that some processes should be allowed to vary flies in the face of the century-old movement toward standardization. Process standardization is taught to MBAs, embedded in Six Sigma programs, and practiced by managers and consultants worldwide. Thousands of manufacturing companies have achieved tremendous improvements in quality and efficiency by copying the Toyota Production System, which combines rigorous work standardization with approaches such as just-in-time delivery of components and the use of visual controls to highlight deviations. Process standardization also has permeated nearly every service industry, generating impressive gains.

With success, though, has come overuse. Process standardization has been pushed too far, with little regard for where it does and does not make sense.  According to the authors, scientific process management calls for blindly reducing variability. But sometimes variability cannot be avoided. Take the inconsistencies in the wood used in the soundboards of pianos. In other cases, the costs of decreasing variability outweigh the benefits—for instance, if doctors applied a cookbook approach to treating complex diseases. The traditional scientific approach to such situations is to try to tame the environment by imposing complex rules that spell out what to do in every possible circumstance. Not only does that reduce accountability, but it often causes workers to switch to autopilot instead of trying to understand the specifics of each job.

Of the 9 out of the 10 Apple customer service people I’ve spoken to the last 20 days, only one of them have shown empathy, all the rest were on autopilot mode, shown zero empathy and all were acting like a piece of code. Next time if anyone from Apple try reading a script to me again, I have some nasty things words for them, because I am a very pissed Apple customer.

HP deserves a five stars rating. It is the Ritz-Carlton equivalent for computers and printers. See below the cool Vivienne Tam's design, truly fashion meets technology.  For AppleCare, all you get is free phone support and three years of sub-standard mail-in repair service.

Can Product Designers Please Standardize All Chargers, Cables, Batteries And Accesories? That's The Easiest First Step.

The Greener Gadgets Conference is underway in NYC this morning, with intros by Jill Fehrenbacher and Marc Alt and Keynote from Saul Griffith.  This is a great event to bring people together to share ideas to deal with our current accelerated pace of creating electronic toxic waste that create series threat to our environment. How many chargers we are throwing away every year? The area of consumer electronics, in particular, needs to make a radical shift from products that are replaced every few months or years to what Griffith called "heirloom" products, like a Mont Blanc pen or Rolex watch that lasts decades. Long-lasting products have a significantly lower embedded carbon footprint, he said.

"We need to give products to consumers with one-tenth the power consumption and that last ten times as long," Griffith said. "That implies service economies (for refurbishing or repairing products). Those will be the business models of the future."

I like the idea of this solar strap power attached to your cell phone, this thing from Strap-Ya features a tiny solar cell which is capable of harnessing the power of the sun to charge your handset.

How many cell phones you have given or thrown away? And all associated accessories and chargers? Why can’t they standardize the chargers? Batteries are the worst in terms of sustainability issues. We’re all hooked on our consumer electronics — iPods, cell phones, laptops and gameboys — but we’re all starting to hear about some of the pitfalls of our gadgets’ manufacturing processes and power consumption habits.

There are a lot of humanitarian and sustainability efforts driving innovators to think globally while creating products that work locally. Empowered by emerging and self-sufficient energy technologies including human, solar and rechargeable energy, panelists will describe how eco-designed products can create simple yet life changing solutions for these global dilemmas. This is the second event and they also awards competition that highlights sustainability and innovation in consumer technology. This one day event brings together folks from electronics industry, inventors and designers to address key green topics including product design, recycling programs, product marketing, energy efficiency and more. 

One idea I like is called Recompute. It is a new way of thinking about computers that layers sustainable ideas throughout its lifecycle to make an overall sustainable product that can be easily replicated. Recompute address sustainability along three main points during its life.

Manufacturing: Rather than making a large tower constructed from numerous materials (ABS plastic, aluminum, steel, etc.), hundreds of manufacturing processes, and dozens of individual components, the Recompute case is made of corrugated cardboard (recyclable and renewable). There are four low-impact manufacturing processes to assemble Recompute: Die cutting, gluing (with non-toxic white glue), printing and electronic assembly. Recompute uses only three major electronic components: A motherboard with processor & memory, power supply, and a hard drive.

Use: Recompute is designed to allow the user to take advantage of existing hardware. For example; use the keyboard from a previous computer. For additional flexibility, external hardware customization is easy via 8 USB ports.

Disposal: Electronic components need to be properly recycled as they contain toxic heavy metals. However, this is often skipped because dismantling of computers is difficult. Recompute can be disassembled without tools, so the electronics and case can be easily recycled individually.

Very cool ideas. I would like to see the whole office machines environment be designed with the same concepts in mind. In fact, I would like to see Apple making them. In that case, the carton used would be white instead.

Designing The Microsoft Retail Store Experience. Here Are Three Good Ideas.

Microsoft last week announced it’s plan to start opening retail stores everywhere in the country, people immediately think of Apple stores. But what is Microsoft going to sell?  Microsoft makes very little of it's own hardware unlike Sony. But even Sony’s retail strategy is questionable. The Sony stores are so boring. Remember those IBM stores that existed 10 years ago? Even the Nintendo store in NY City is nothing more than a showroom. There’s very little reason for Microsoft to have its own stores.  Ok you have the Xbox360 and some mobile stuff, what else? Microsoft said it has hired David Porter, a 25-year Wal-Mart veteran, to head the retail effort. Most recently, Porter was at DreamWorks Animation, heading product distribution.

Expect to see Microsoft evangelists walking around in the store in Window Ts with some Windows mobile gadget. The stores won’t ne white…as it will be too Apple. I was in an Apple store today to pick up a new MacBook Air as mine is schedule for repair, I see long lines of people, some shopping and some just hanging out there who knows what they are doing.  This is not going to happen with Microsoft. Having a store doesn’t make a company hip. Let me try to imagine the unique store experiences. Here are three ideas to start:

Instead of Apple's sheer walls of glass and white décor with friendly staff in colorful Ts, Microsoft's stores will have steel and metallic design with Windows color accent, and the staff will wear different colored golf shirts. With each color representing Starter, Basic, Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Make sure you talk to the right person otherwise they will keep referring you to others.

Instead of a "Genius Bar" Microsoft will offer a “Stress Bar.” It will be staffed by Microsofties trained in the art of making life more complicated and fixes that often lead to more problems. The store will offer Windows branded painkillers. There is a security device and will display warning on the big screen such as “Windows had detected that you are Mac users and not welcomed in this store.”

Store hours are pretty unpredictable, it will generally stick to mall hours but at any given time the store randomly shuts down instantaneously for no apparent reason.  A sign will be posted outside “Windows encounters an error and needs to shut down.” Kind of pop-up stores hours with no real pop-ups.

Sounds fun.

Making Great Products That People Love Is Simple. It All Comes Down to three Things: A Simple User Experience, Design Around The Socialability Of A Product And The Uncovering Of Memories And Pleasure Associated With A Product.

Product designers are becoming marketers. Introducing the Baby Blackberry by Leapfrog. It's time that kids of high flying executives need their own Blackberry.  The good news is that while your kid can type messages on the Baby Blackberry, it's not actually hooked up to anything.  If I were the designer, I would have the thing to play Dad’s or Mom’s voices every time they press a keypad.  Dad can remotely play a bedtime stories remotely while on a business trip. That would be cool.

Making great products that people love is pretty simple. It all comes down to three things: A simple user experience, design the product around its socialability of uncovering memories and pleasure of a product. Designers are often putting too much energy doing task analysis on the basic features, and missed the three most important elements of product design.

What a product designer needs to create things that people desire. Things that jump out from the sea of sameness and justify a premium price? Can design change the elasticity of products and shape the demand curve? If yes, then what’s the use of conducting quantitative research when consumers are not inspired by possibilities?  You can ask 500 moms if they want to buy a video game console (and the answers is no) versus if they want to have a Wii. The problem with market research is the misapplication, that way it often produces misleading data. Worst than not having any at all.

What makes product desirable? What makes them desirable to an extent that people are attached to it (like the Blackberry, iPod or Birkin)? What is the basis of those emotional bonding? Are they based on the brand or the product or a combination of both? They would go to the extreme of repair it or even keeping it while also buying an updated version, it affects multiple ownerships.

To extend the psychological life span of products could be instrumental to reduce the demand for scarce resources and many sustainable challenges. Up to now, the role of the product and its design in stimulating the degree of attachment experienced toward this object remains quite obscure. As the product is under the designer's direct control, understanding these issues is valuable for designers. Industrial designs have a strong technical rationality and that sometimes limiting them to be reflective.

Donald Schön’s book The Reflective Practitioner (1983) discusses the crisis for professional practice. This crisis relates mainly to the fact that professions such as architecture, and design but also medicine and psychology are strongly dominated by technical rationality and its positivist epistemology of practice. The problem is that PE cannot solve the dilemma of “rigor versus relevance” professionals are confronted with. This is because PE is based on analytical, empirical and logical propositions of truth within an objective world. However, professional knowledge involves experiences, feelings and subjective evaluations, which are non-existent for PE.

The "fuzzy front end" is usually what matters and makes the most difference.  This early stage of product development are often given the wrong start when too much emphasis on the cost and volume trade-off. Not enough thinking around hot to turn any products into a personal tool.  A tool to get work done or too to tell other who you are. A forklift, a cell phone or a toaster, you should not start with how to produce the most number of units for the lowest price while getting them into the hands of the most people.  This should come from the sales people, not the product design team. What people value most is the way that they interact with a product and what meanings it carry and this goes beyond price. The visual form, the way that they handle it, and how it makes them feel and think are all part of the design strategy. At the end, product design is simple. It is all about three things:

- Understand the core feature that a user wants and then relentlessly reduce complexity and unnecessarily elements until you get to a simple user experience.
- Map out the product's socialability - its affiliation with social groups and any product or its category and how it is connected to different social groups or product group.
- Look hard to find memories that are related to the product and pleasure that are directly and indirectly associated by using the product. Hire an anthropologist to help.

Service Design Is Simple. It's All About Three Things: Creating Compelling User Benefits, Optimizing Based On The Separability Of The Service And Making Educated Trade-offs Between Human And Technology.

Service design is an innovative and emerging discipline. I am not referring it to the older definition in the manufacturing and hospitality industries.  Today, almost every business is a service business. How service companies bring innovation to life depends first on their definition. Pure services cover a wide range and heterogeneous field ranging from low volume retailing to highly interactive digital interfaces. High volume, also technologically enabled activities like telecommunications, utilities, banking and insurance.

An example would be ING, trying to define what a virtual bank would look like was not a simple task for ING DIRECT.  How do you get wary consumers who expect vaults and teller cages to trust a virtual bank?  The key is to design for the mind and senses. Today’s businesses need to consider their emotional relationship with their customers as a key component of their value proposition. Designing a compelling customer experience enables this relationship. ING DIRECT sells a unique (and super simple) range of product sand engages the customer in a unique way, creating the opportunity for a trust engagement as well as, ultimately, customer acquisition. There were so many customer barriers to overcome and address.

Another example is LG. They make and sell appliances. Now you can drag your dirty laundry over to the hip Canal St Martin neighborhood to wash it at the LG WashBar. The concept is unique: buy a drink at the bar and get free access to the upstairs “apartment” where you can do your laundry—washing powder comes free too!—browse books from the library, watch movies, and check your e-mails at the two free wireless hotspots. It’s a great place to hang out. The feel is cosy minimalist design meeting a high-tech appliance aesthetic. There’s even a dance floor downstairs for DJ nights. Fresh clothes and Saturday night dance...sound good to me. The plan is to open up 15 across France.

So how does service innovation happen? It begins with gathering insights including goals and paths, prototyping the working experience and evidencing, next is service blueprinting. It all comes down to three things: Creating compelling user benefits, optimize based on the separability of the service nature and making sensible automation/human trade-offs.

Develop Compelling User Benefits. Understand what type of benefit/value a service innovation can provide. Is this innovation an important core benefit or a new way of delivering an existing benefit? Examples:  Cirque du Soleil (new core benefit), Netflix mail order DVD rental (new benefit), Blockbuster's self-destruct DVD in 48 hours (new benefit), Ford's latest use of radar-based active safety technology linked to satellite (new benefit).

Optimize based the separability of the service.  Is this innovation for a service that is produced and consumed simultaneously? Examples: Telemedicine (create separable services), Blackberry (mostly inseparable services), Enterprise Car Rental (create inseparable services) or iTunes (create inseparable services).

Model the service economics and making trade-offs. Customers are expensive. Dealing with them cost money. Putting them through a speech recognition application to offload calls save money but lower the quality of the experience. Each year, call centers implement new technologies that can take over the functions previously handled by people. Why then are customers so unhappy, if we expect call centers to implement technology that will make customers happy and provide them faster service? Simple, because technology does not equal quality customer service. 

Take Nintendo Wii as an example, GlucoBoy, a game compatible with the Game Boy Advance or DS Lite, was launched in Australia on World Diabetes Day. The Glucoboy makes monitoring and achieving blood sugar goals fun. Whenever a user performs a glucose test, points are awarded which allows the user to unlock games. More points are awarded if the user’s blood sugar falls within the specified goals. The points may be spent in the game or the GRIP online community. Users post their scores to the GRIP community to see who has the best scores in a town, country, and world. Nintendo has plenty of opportunities to create new benefits (and revenue) through service designs.

The Nintendo idea was created by Paul Wessel who noticed that his 9-year-old son would constantly lose his glucose monitor but not his gameboy. Mr. Wessel states “That moment Five years ago design was about the creation of beautiful and usable objects. Human has a similar project using service design when they pioneer the use of games for health industry. The idea is to create ways for people of all ages to improve their health and well being through the use of video game technology. Expect to see more service design innovation when healthcare and gaming crossover.

Today, it is additionally and increasingly thought to be a valid approach to problems related to, well, anything - be it global warming, poor transportation or social issues. What differentiates the designers’ way to solve societal problems from that of other professionals’? The essence of design still lies in the quest for aesthetic, functional as well as sensorial experiences that appeal to and help societies. To design is to make the problem-solving a matter of the heart as much as rationality. While engineers can make banks efficient, designers can make customers happy. Efficiency and happiness are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately many businesses today act as if they are. They will be surprised who service designers can change that.

What's At The Intersection Of Chocolate And Pop Music?

I have many friends who are chocolate lovers, but not many friends who are a fan of Grace Jones (that is if they know her at all). When Grace Jones first broke onto the art/music scene some 20 years ago, many thought of the gender-bending pop icon more as a Jean Paul Goude media creation and personality than a true talent. Her visual identity is always as important as her voice. Her latest album, Hurricane, brings new meaning to  the idea of dancing confectionary The designer wanted to bring out the idea but Jones wanted to have control over her image, here’s the compromise.

Collaborating with Tom Hingston Studio. Jones once again works the conceit of the pop star as visual commodity, in this case featuring life-size versions of her made out of chocolate. The chocolatiers at Thorntons chocolate factory in Derbyshire, where the photo shoot took place, suggested casting molds for each body part and actually creating life-size chocolate versions of Jones. She immediately jumped on the idea. Not sure what she has in mind in terms of what part of her she wants people to eat first.

If you’ve ever been to one of those woman-power mask-making ceremonies, you know that the casting process is not for the claustrophobic. You have to sit still for 20 minutes, completely encased except for two small nostril holes, to let the mold set. Jones took it all in stride. I am not sure if I want a Grace Jones chocolate. I think I’d prefer Jessica Alba or Avril Lavigne or Beyonce. What’s your pick? For me, just give me a chocolate IPod.

Have a Merry Christmas!

In a World Where There Are Too Many Designers And Too Little Design Thinking. The Same Thing Can Be Said About Strategy: Too Many Strategists And Too Little Innovation.

We have too many designers and too little design thinking. The same can be said about too many business strategists and not enough innovations. Look around us, we see ugly looking products with poor form and function.  Read these corporate releases we see a lot of talk about innovation but you hardly see anything innovative coming out from these companies. Strategist copying each other the same way designers copy and modify each others' designs. It is disappointing.

So, many of our everyday things are ugly.  Laptops are probably the worst (Apple is the exception of course) and coffee makers are ugly, including some of the high end ones.  90% of all automobile designs coming from Detroit are ugly and it's these companies that are to blame for what 's happening.  It's no wonder their cars are not selling. One thing I don’t understand is how possible that HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo and many others still fail to improve the aesthetics of notebook computers. Every time I see the launch of a new ugly notebook, it always makes me wonder how this could be possible.  Where are the designers when we need them?

Designers are everywhere. Giving some choices of color does not automatically improve the product appeal.  Here’s one example, a Lenovo Olympics special limited edition laptop. Yike! What a waste of a what could be a very cool idea.

There are two reasons 1/ Computers makers see a laptop as a laptop; there is absolutely no imagination. 2/ Designers suck, mediocre ones suck more, there are too many mediocre designers that are insensitive to what’s going on and some are simply arrogant. Unless you have a really good designer, you may be better off go “undesign”. Democratization or design is inevitable and is not stoppable.  Mediocre designers will concern if there is still a job waiting for them as everyone with a bit of taste can learn to design.  The design generation (meaning everyone) will become conversational and social. Who needs designers?

Companies including LG see the important of design and is committed to make superior in aesthetic design a core part of its corporate strategy. LG was selected as one of the 12 “best of the best” design concept winners by Red Dot Award (the three most respected design awards in the world) for its futuristic laptop PC design, which has a wide screen and operates on eco-friendly alcohol power.

The future laptop, dubbed “ebook,” uses organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels for display instead of the current liquid crystal display (LCD) panel. Unlike LCD, OLED does not need a frame around it, and it consumes less electricity. It also features a transparent cylindrical hinge that is used as storage for clean fuels such as methyl alcohol. The keypad will also be made of a singe OLED panel, like the one used in LG’s Chocolate Phone, which was copied by Samsung for its cell phones and MP3 players.

Another pleasant victory for LG over its rival Samsung is taking place in the refrigerator and washing machine market. In the summer, both Samsung and LG challenged fashion designers to produce cover designs for refrigerators and washing machines. The result was a huge victory for LG. According to retailers Himart and Etland, LG sold more than 1,200 Dios refrigerators that have flowery patterns borrowed from painter Ha Sang-rim, while Samsung sold less than 500 units.

Dell (the company who makes boring computers) is getting innovative.  They are producing laptops designed by award winning artist from Africa.  Picture above is designed by Siobhan Gunning, born in Mombasa, East Africa and as an artist has had the opportunity to visit many of the unique locations in Africa, like the Great Rift Valley, the Serengeti Plains, the Ngoro Ngoro Crater, and even traveling up the Nile to its source. During her travels she has been privileged to observe wildlife in their native habitat and visit with tribes like the Masai and Samburu.

This one is designed by African artist Joseph Amedokpo,  an artist in east Africa and supports his family through painting, using locally produced oils he blends by hand, on canvases made from recycled flour sacks. While painting, Amedokpo chats with frequent visitors and listens to a short wave radio, gaining a global perspective on peoples’ failures and weakness, as well at their core strength and hope, which is reflected in his work.

Smart idea Dell, still ugly machines. Do something about it please.