Our mobile phones are tracking where we go, all day, every day, whether we like it or not. Right now, they’re tracking varying degrees of accuracy, from a radius measured in miles, to within a block. With services like Latitude, Loopt and Brightkite, our location is slowly becoming more public. It’s plausible that in the [...]
Posts from ‘May, 2009’
The impact of micro-interactions on brand perception
The perception of one’s brand is an aggregation of every single interaction with that brand. Yet in my experience, brand owners don’t focus enough attention on the little things. The many micro-interactions that reinforce or change perceptions. Here is a nice example of what I mean by the little things. Before Google, Sun Microsystems occupied [...]
Is design simply a process for managing risk?
Last night I attended Designology, a well run panel by brand consultancy Landor. For most of the conversation, I was nodding my head in agreement: “design is a process”, “the design process needs to be collaborative and involve stakeholders”, “your solutions are only as good as the questions you ask”, “good ideas come from everywhere”, [...]
Hello everyone, this is your captain speaking
Last year I was on an Air Canada flight from Toronto to San Francisco. Over the Rockies, I was subjected to the worst turbulence I’ve ever experienced. On numerous occasions it felt like the plane was falling out of the sky. I was gripping my seat, my body was in a sweat, but I wasn’t [...]
Hello software. Meet poka-yoke.
Here is a nice out-of-box experience from Netgear.
Some nice feedforward on what to do makes it hard to go wrong. This is common in product design, where designers apply the poka-yoke principle to ensure that things cannot be operated incorrectly.
…the term can refer to any behavior-shaping constraint designed into a product to prevent incorrect operation [...]
Reinforcing / Changing brand perceptions
I exited the BART station in downtown San Francisco to be greeted by two lovely girls, decked out in nice Lufthansa uniforms asking if I wanted a free breakfast bag. Yes, please.
Presumably the goal of this marketing activity was to increase awareness of, and improve people’s perceptions of Lufthansa by challenging their expectations of bad [...]