QR codes – they seem like a good idea, yet their implementation is often shallow and clumsy. Tesco have certainly shown what can be done with QR codes building a shopping experience at train stations in South Korea.
Now Sportsgirl are bringing the experience to Australia with a shopping billboard in Chappel Street Melbourne, as reported in today’s SMH.
Steve Ogden-Barnes, a retail industry fellow at the Deakin graduate school of business, said pop-up shops had been around for almost a decade but pop-up billboards were taking online shopping to a new level.
”An interactive billboard is a very interesting idea because it gets people to engage in the brand even though they are not in the store or at their PC,” Mr Ogden-Barnes said.
An article in today’s SMH about the Domino’s food chain struck me as quite significant. Customers’ increased use of mobile devices when ordering has resulted in efficiency gains and increased profits for the business. Customers’ use of devices when ordering has:
increased products sold per transaction
increased efficiency due to improved accuracy of orders as customers self serve
… although consumers were eating out less, they were visiting Dominos more often, increasing their order sizes and typically buying more side dishes such as ice-cream and garlic bread.
What does this mean? Apparently this translates to Dominos upgrading its “earnings growth for this financial year by about 20 per cent” and “By 2016 it expects 80 per cent of pizza sales to originate online.” So things are looking up.
The article hints at a deep digital strategy with apps available on the Android platform (presumably as well as the iPhone), social media integration and targeted marketing through one-to-one communication channels with customers.
Over Christmas, I started working on a new Posterous blog called Designing the Work Experience. I’ll quote from the About page to explain why:
Service design has sprung from user experience (UX) design as the scope of UX projects has become wider. It is slowly forming in Australia with agencies and consultancies offering it in their repertoire of services. UX designers know how to deliver on technology projects. But service design exists in a different setting altogether. To implement service design concepts must be delivered and embraced by staff. To sustain service design concepts the culture of organisations and work environments often needs to shift.
As I have realised this in my own work I have been looking further afield to business and management sources to inform how I might implement service design. This site is my archive of the most informative articles related to my projects.
Marc Stickdorn is an academic and author of This is Service Design Thinking so we were more than lucky to have him address the group. Stickdorn teaches to both design and business students. A theme of the night was working and communicating across disciplines, with these two important requirements:
That the design community, specifically the UX design community generate a shared language to represent and promote itself consistently
That service designers learn the terminology of the other disciplines they are working with
Stickdorn quizzed us on product versus service, touchpoint versus channel, introduced us to service dominant logic and the experience economy but he really wanted to abandon the slide deck and just open up the conversation. Which he did. I think he actually found us to be a little shy as a bunch.
The group questions canvassed the following topics:
Ethnography for Marketers -- A guide to consumer immersion
Ethnography for Marketers was recommended to me in 2007, I finally got round to reading it in 2010 and the other day I revisited the copious notes I took. This is a book about ethnography, research, projects and design. But why write a blog post that is a book review? Particular when the subject is essentially a text book?
As the title suggests this is a book targeted at marketers not designers but don’t let that put you off. This is a text book for user centred design that anyone who describes themselves in anyway “UX” should read. This is also a text that anyone managing UX projects should read.
Not only does the book provide a framework to conducting observational qualitative research – it goes into the detail of how to conduct that research:
There’s efficiency and there’s experience. Last month I published an article for UX Mag on the subject of customer efficiency. It opens with a story about the Melbourne trams. It’s conductors were replaced by machines in an efficiency drive. However the efficiency of customers and of the service required consideration around tasks beyond ticket purchase. Conductors served a multitude of customer needs but in the narrow assessment of their use they were deemed redundant.
Tram conductor - Illustration by Nam Nguyen
A reader of the article, Lisa Chow, cited an example from her own professional experience as a library consultant in the comments. A system to check out books replaced librarians doing the task but the self service model wasn’t necessarily efficient for users trying to achieve multiple tasks in the act of borrowing a book–like querying outstanding fines.
This blog post is about diary studies and how to go about conducting them.
What are diary studies?
Diary studies, otherwise known as User Research Diaries or “Cultural probes” were pioneered for use in design research by William “Bill” Gaver, Professor at Goldsmiths London. Interestingly he doesn’t analyse diary content, nor does he create scenarios or personas from them instead using them as a base from which to validate other data. He does not create personas, preferring instead to revisit the raw data.
Diary studies are used in longitudinal research — looking at people over a longer period of time than a typical Contextual Inquiry or interview can allow; and researching people when you could not otherwise be there with them.
What are diary studies good for?
Great for understanding the activities undertaken by participants, what they actually do.
The first Service Design Conference was held earlier this month in Sydney, organised by Steve Baty and Donna Spencer – the team behind UX Australia. It was one stream with 7 presentations in scenic Darling Harbour. It was nice to not have to scurry between rooms for multiple tracks and good to know I wasn’t missing out on anything. The attendees were a UX crowd, and all seemed to be practitioners within the service design space. There was only a brief mention about the differences between service design and experience design. Everyone there wasn’t about to be held up on semantics. All the speakers dove straight in to describe how they work and deliver as service design practitioners.
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