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.

This site …  primarily serves as a link repository to articles found elsewhere on the web. … I will only post parts of articles with the occasional comment on why I think this reading is relevant to service design to encourage readers to go to the original source of content, and give authors and publishers their due credit and traffic.

… After many years as a web professional I started working in teams delivering service design projects. … What became apparent to me through these projects was that the most important touch point to design for was staff … Soon enough I was collaborating with and talking to managers, team leaders, change managers and human resource professionals. After all, I was colonising their turf and needing them to buy-in to my ideas. But my ideas were changing too. The realm of design I was used to occupying — websites, brochures, booklets, print artefacts — was being replaced by activities, workshops, seminars and tools. The environment my “design” was landing in was also changing. I was no longer concerned with the technology environment. My “design” was beginning to exist in a human environment that concerned incentives, culture, management, knowledge and soft skills.

Naturally my reading changed during this time. The usual design sources just weren’t equipping me for what I needed to contend with. I began reading business journals and scouring academic articles on management and group theory. Hence this blog to house and share the links I have come across that I hope will benefit others in the Service Design community.

I’ll still be posting to eri on the interweb, but the new blog will have a more specific focus – an experiment in and of itself. As mentioned above the new blog is more of an archive of interesting articles. Anything where I contribute a significant amount of content will also be cross posted here. So check it out, and please let me know what you think.

Remember when the yellow pages used to be big and floppy and there were two of them? A-Z now in one 1616 page volume.

Posted via email from everyday eri

Search for “Santorum” and the top result will land you on this page. I was just alerted to this long running campaign via a friend’s Facebook post. The details of it are documented on Wikipedia. Its part political activism against the US senator’s anti gay remarks, part organic google bomb. Organic in the sense that organic search terms are ones that rise to the top of search engine results pages without manipulation. The wikipedia entry of the campaign to create this neologism (a new word definition) included this account of the request to Google to address the matter. 

In September 2011 Santorum asked Google to intervene by altering the indexing of the content, saying, “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country…To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”^[4] In response to Santorum’s request, a Google spokesperson asserted that Google does not “remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines.”^[4]

This story strikes me as a kind of keyboard democracy. Its the popularity, interest and linking to this page that is resulting in the high search result. And perhaps some future business for reputation managers out there. 

Posted via email from everyday eri

Posted via email from everyday eri

Twitter user sued by ex-employer for his followers (SMH).

The details are fairly clear cut:

• Employee tweets under Twitter handle that bears both his and the company’s name
• Employee amasses 17,000 followers in 4 years
• Employee leaves company and reaches agreement with employer to keep his account as long as he posts occasionally on their behalf
• Employee changes his Twitter account name to his own name and (not sure how) keeps his followers under his new handle
• Former employer then sues (8 months have passed at this time) claiming Twitter list as customer list. They claim that they have invested significant resources to grow the list and consider it their property.

A ruling has not been made as yet but no doubt many are looking on with interest. I won’t go plagiarizing the article further but I encourage you to read it. Companies should proactively define their social media policy so as not to be caught off guard.

1. Define at the outset if employees will be posting from their personal or company accounts
2. State at the outset who owns the accounts
3. If posting from personal accounts decide protocol of disclosure, e.g.:
   – Employees are expected/encouraged to post and declare affiliation
   – Employees are free to post but any views expressed are their own and do not in any way, unless specified reflect the views or opinions of their employer
4. Set guidelines for what employees can publish, and how they should respond to customers on digital channels. Encourage a conversation internally about the guidelines and iterate them as appropriate.
5. Monitor what is published in the interest of improving the voice of the company online (not for surveillance purposes) and share success stories.
6. Ensure appropriate handover procedure for when employees leave

Related links:

• http://mumbrella.com.au/should-journos-have-their-twitter-profiles-taken-from-them-if-they-change-job-13600

Erietta: How’s the Daemon crew? All good I trust
Jason: Yeah we are going well. Daemon sent the team to Melbourne for cfobjective
Erietta: Was it good?
Jason: There were some good sessions, Geoff’s varnish talk was very popular
Jason: Varnish is a reverse proxy solution we now use
Erietta: oooh!
Jason: http://www.daemon.com.au/slides/varnish/index.html#slide1
Erietta: I am so dumb now, seriously, I don’t know what any of this stuff means any more. What has become of me?! Is this slide deck html 5?
Jason: Yeah
Erietta: Nice. I still need a dummies translation of what that all means though. I know it means “faster”, thats it. I’m too noob
Jason: Basically you put a server in front of your applications, which takes the request, sends the request on to the server, grabs the html it returns, and caches it locally in memory (can overflow to disk as well). Next request just pulls from the local cache, you can also break your page up into smaller caches each with their own timeouts and then it’s about all the exceptions and rules and varnish makes it easy its veerrrrry efficient, scales very well.
Erietta: OK, so it’s an intermediary server that gets the requests, has a cache of relevant html and serves that up to the next person who is asking for the same thing?
Jason: and all runs on the tiniest server, so bang for buck its stellar
Erietta: hmmmm
Jason: has added benefits like if your application server dies it keeps serving from local cache.
Erietta: So the request from the second person/user/visitor is basically just getting html only and not going to the app server at all.
Jason: yep
Erietta: aaah ok
Jason: Not only that if 10 people simultaneously request while its fetching a new request they either a) get queued behind first at proxy or b) get served old copy if available its really good if you have a 30k newsletter drop that kills your server.
Erietta: How does it differ to the caching engine you made for FarCry a couple of years ago. That had granular caching, if that’s a term I can use i.e. was able to serve new elements (updated content) while serving other cached content.
Jason: well FarCry cache relies on cf threads still. This stands in front dedicated and is waaaaay more efficient. Its written specifically to do this task.
Erietta: and technology agnostic obviously
Jason: it manages memory specifically for this task whereas java memory management is architected for a different purpose
Erietta: that being?
Jason: well objects in code
Erietta: as opposed to pages?
Jason: so in java some objects live longer than others which means the memory is subject to garbage collection a process you can’t directly control. Whereas dedicated caching objects in varnish live until they are told not to live anymore because they were replaced. Java has a machinery in the java virtual machine which is way more complex than straight caching needs to be so varnish memory management is directly allocated and deallocated: https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes
Erietta: oh good you just linked me to a life story there. Give me the crib notes #lazyweb ! ;)
Jason: that last paragraph is the explanation, just highlights that the memory is written specifically for the task, not a framework that is flexible but with trade-offs, e.g java
Erietta: 

“Now imagine that another CPU wants to n_bar+++ at the same time, can it do that ? No. Caches operate not on bytes but on some “linesize” of bytes, typically from 8 to 128 bytes in each line. So since the first cpu was busy dealing with n_foo, the second CPU will be trying to grab the same cache-line, so it will have to wait, even through it is a different variable.”

Jason: think Farcry is a framework which makes it easy to build apps but that framework means the trade-off is performance if you built every single page on a website from scratch with a view to optimising that page you’d be 1000x more efficient than using a framework
Erietta: got it. So what other performance improvements have been made
to the FarCry framework while I haven’t been watching?
Jason: we rewrote caching :P testing it as we speak. Uses a new algorithm which is dynamic replacement cache. It also factors in memory used into the caching mechanism
Erietta: dude, that page is hard core. WHAT DOES IT MEAN!
Jason: hehe ok so previously in FarCry the way we cached was using a number we made up per content type of objects cached e.g. 1000 for html. Now we have 1 single cache which does both objects and html snippets and it dynamically resizes itself depending on what’s going on so it checks the oldgen part of memory in the jvm to see if we are at 70%. Additionally its clever in the way it chooses what objects to evict in that it will be optimised so pages like homepage and news landing page etc aren’t ever evicted before a news article from 2006 so what you see on that dump is the resizes and the memory stats and hits vs evicts. 81452 hits vs 6743 misses is an awesome hit ratio. 8% miss rate which means only 8% of those object requests needed to go to the db (or if a webskin had to be rebuilt)
Erietta: Sweet. That’s cool. What about performance of the site tree in FarCry? Has that improved? From memory it was using its own JS library?
Jason: haha nope still same tree. We are using twitter bootstrap for our forms now on some of our projects. Additionally Matt’s refactored permissions so anyone can do them not just a dev, like we could hand over the webtop to a producer to configure for the client.

The panel at Digital Citizens: Ben Shepherd – Sound Alliance; Sam Buckingham – singer / songwriter; Gareth Stuckey – Director, Gigpiglet; Dan Rosen – ARIA Chief Executive Officer; Neil Ackland – Sound Alliance; moderated by@acatinatree. The event was held at FBI Social.

So the topic of the evening was meant to be Social media and the music industry but that’s not quite what we got.

Everyone talked about the revenue/rights quandary but there was no real talk of how they were strategising for the digital age. Except for Sam Buckingham, a singer songwriter who has leveraged social media to connect to her fan base, build a loyal following and even crowd sourced $11,000 via the Pozible platform to fund her first album.

Buckingham: "I don't make any money off Youtube, but I use it to build my fanbase which funds my next album" #digicitz

December 5, 2011 7:26 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@eCitizens

Digital Citizens

There was talk at the outset of how well ARIA did “engaging” fans this year on Twitter. So what? The ARIA awards are on television. It’s got a pretty good head start because its being broadcast.

Somehow it just seemed that the panel, with exception of aforementioned indie songstress, was hanging on to the old way of doing business. They reinforced the status quo again and again – acts still need the music business, there’s no such thing really as independent artists. Um, yes there is and the hecklers* in the crowd started listing acts: The Jezebels, John Butler Trio, amongst others.

Sounds like the panel like the way things were #Digicitz

December 5, 2011 6:55 pm via YoruFukurouReplyRetweetFavorite

@franksting

Gavin Costello

The topic of discovery and curated listening was raised by the moderator. The consensus was that serendipitous discover wasn’t all that it is cracked up to be and listeners need those cool music types to tell what they need to hear. OK so Genius, and other recommendation engines don’t work and won’t improve? So tag classification systems on Soundcloud or Hypemachine are useless? I know I’m a relatively savvy user but I also have faith that users, given a good service and a good UI, will explore features made available to them if they find them useful.

I agree that Last.fm hasn't evolved as much as it could, but I still love it; so much music discovery it's given me #confession #digicitz

December 5, 2011 7:28 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@natface

Nathalie Swainston

The panel, I think it was Ben Shepherd from Sound Alliance segmented the music audience into two types: loyalists and casual listeners. It was implied that casual listeners will never pay and will be satisfied with free streaming music services and illegal downloads. I think these guys just hang out with the cool kids. There is a whole mainstream audience out there – sure they might listen to Susan Boyle sometimes – but they are happy to pay for music. Case in point, the entire Apple iTunes platform proves that if you create an ecosystem that makes purchasing seamless for the user they will indeed pay. What royalties artists derive from this is another matter entirely and nothing to do with social media and the music industry.

Repeatedly the panel kept talking about the web as a channel but not about social media as a platform. But it was worse than that. The web channel they spoke of looked entirely like a broadcast option only delivered via their specific platforms or partnerships. Convenient.

Sound Aliiance have come to a partnership with last.fm but aren't able to tell us what it is #digicitz

December 5, 2011 7:10 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@eCitizens

Digital Citizens

An audience member pointed out that the three revenue streams of artists (synchronisation as in licensing from film and advertising, touring and merchandising sales) have changed only marginally and that the album, except for the top 10% of artists, has always been a loss leader. He asked Dan Rosen of ARIA where they fit in the new model of rental versus ownership (audio below). The response was that ARIA will support any legal way of purchasing music where rights/money flow back to the artist.

This led to the question of whether ARIA are exploring a streaming music chart? Sweden has one and apparently artists generate more revenue from streaming music services than they do from iTunes. OK this is interesting stuff but its platform, not social media. I also was left with no impression that ARIA are actively lobbying and negotiating with the likes of Spotify, soon to enter the Australian market. They most probably are, it just sounded so reactive on the night.

Ironically it was Ben Shepherd from Sound Alliance who was skeptical of whether Spotify will provide artists with the royalty cheques they deserve. We had learnt earlier on the night that radio only pays 1% royalties for the music they pay. This is clearly a disgrace, particularly when you consider the size of businesses like Austereo. He projected the Spotify IPO could raise a billion dollars the  Australian advertising revenues of Spotify in the millions* but he lamented that they would likely pay only minimal royalties. Why did I preface this as ironic? Because Sound Alliance themselves don’t necessarily pay their music writers for their content.

Sam Buckingham finished the night with a point that was at least on topic. Social media is about making fans and keeping them. And of course so much more.

#Digicitz Sam's point is a good one. Musicians need to focus on a direct to fan model & provide a great experience at gigs & online

December 5, 2011 6:28 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@roneo

Josephine Sabin

Full disclaimer: Some of those said hecklers are my friends and are themselves either music fans or music industry boffins.

Thanks to Jo Sabin for subbing this post.

* Thanks to Ben Shepherd who clarified what he said in regards to the potential Spotify IPO, correcting me in his comment below.

Toby & Pete founders speaking at Apple Store Sydney for Australian Infront

What do you do with your eponymous moniker when your duo turns into a company? That was the predicament that Toby & Pete founders, Toby Pike and Piotr Stopniak found themselves in only 18 months after they started and the focus of their talk for the Apple/Australian Insight series. Toby & Pete are CGI artists who specialise in print media. They produce phantasmagorical images for the likes of Nike, AMP, SBS and Daily Juice.

Current outdoor campaign for Daily Juice Company features artwork by Toby & Pete. At bus stop on William St East Sydney

After 12 months in operation and 100 projects Toby & Pete found themselves at a turning point. They had their own company but had no control of the work they were producing. Their goal was to work alongside art directors on concept and design and not just be CGI “operators”. Their strategy for branching out was to assemble a cooperative of like minded, self driven creatives with complementary skills sets. They grew from a team of two CGI artists to a team of 8 with skills in illustration, animation, app development, web, typography, print and events. The folio changed overnight as did the opportunities before them.

They attribute their success to two factors. Firstly their mission which is to “excel in and out of the pigeon hole”. Having quickly built their reputation for CGI work, they have been determined that everything the studio produce, regardless of medium be of the same quality. Secondly, the cooperative was founded with a manifesto of sorts. While the designers have non exclusive obligations to the agency, everyone is required to work from the studio space. They noted that the turning point of a creative piece can come from someone’s “two cents worth” of feedback. The value of being in a company together is the contribution and input on one another’s projects, especially those conversations in passing. Theirs is the best manifestation of collaboration I have heard in a long time. Collaboration not as a process but as an environment that provides a constant feedback loop.

What can the UX field learn from Toby & Pete?

The creative strategy of Toby & Pete is also a business one. To seize control of their work and have input earlier in projects they diversified their offering. Is this something that the UX field can learn from? UX has matured into a discipline that consults on business strategy – particularly in the area of service design. We have no hesitation stepping on the toes of product managers, marketers, business analysts and business strategists. Yet we often complain how hard it is to be taken seriously by other fields and be considered earlier in the process. Maybe we should stop lobbying and start working together – not as vendors and clients but as colleagues.

Charles Naquin (2010) from DePaul University … conducted research on honesty in people when using email versus pen and paper.

In one study, forty-eight graduate business students were each given $89 (imaginary money) to divide with their partner; they had to decide whether to tell their partner how much money was in the kitty, as well as how much of the money to share with their partner. One group communicated by email and the other group by a handwritten note. The group that wrote emails lied about the amount of money (92%) more than the group that was writing by hand (63%). The e-mail group was also less fair about sharing the money, and felt justified in not being honest or fair.

The study was repeated in a different context and scenario with managers given project funds and the results were the same. Those communicating via pen and paper were more honest than those who communicated electronically.

Weinschenk goes on to talk about “moral disengagement theory” and quotes other studies that look at truth telling on the phone, email, face to face and via instant messaging. She talks about the consequences of this for surveys, feedback and performance reviews.  Moral disengagement theory poses that greater distance is felt when the results as seen as less permanent and when less personal rapport is felt.

So is this what is happening on Post Secret? Scan the original website version of this phenomenon and you will find gut wrenching confessions written on postcards, scrawled, collaged, drawn and painted. Go to the app version and the mood changes completely. The submissions are electronically compiled from the camera roll and submitted to the collection.  The content switches from confession to proclamation, even affirmation. Where did the secrecy go? Did it vanish with the pen and paper?

The book is December’s reading for the UX Book Club. I haven’t been to one of these events before, but this time I have read the book so I will be keen to hear what others learnt from it and thought of it too.

Credits

Thank you Bec for lending me your Kindle so I could read the book and finally attend a UX Book Club with you.

Thank you Mimi for introducing me to Post Secret, and for the Friday laughs at the app submissions and cries at the web posts.

More about the book from the author herself at UXMAG.

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:

1. That the design community, specifically the UX design community generate a shared language to represent and promote itself consistently
2. 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:

• Whether or not he pitches for work — no longer, clients either get it or don’t and management buy in is needed from the get-go
• How he changes the perception of designers? — by reinforcing their role as looking at the holistic customer experience; going on to say that:

Piecemeal consulting is old stuff. My role is changing the culture within organisations.

• How does he “sell” it?  — By talking case studies and attaching real numbers to them. By engaging with the business community at their events.
• Do you need courses? — “Service design is not rocket science” he replied (an amusing and frank answer from an academic). He went on to describe the range of skills that service designers need and emphasised the importance of workshop facilitation and learning to design the workshop itself.

What I learnt from the night was that the service design industry in Europe was born out of academic leadership where the sector leads the charge in service design/design thinking. Stickdorn sees his role as supporting industry by piloting methods and “crunching the numbers” to build case studies for the promotion of service design as a legitimate discipline and approach.

Me and my co-conspirators (Bec & Ahmed) chose to hang around for the backchannel conversation after the event had officially finished with Marc, Damian (Protopartners founder and event organiser) and several others (out yourselves in the comments). While Europe has academia to lead the way we have cloistered ourselves into corners (with the exception of one generous Westpac CX team). UX companies all working away quietly, reluctant to share with each other lest they give anything away.

We all agreed amongst ourselves that the path forward was a more open model, but could also not see this happening with the current players – and we all admitted our own complicity in this. At least we have the event itself as a sharing and learning forum. That’s a start. Melis Senova asked a similar question in her talk at Service Design Drinks. That’s a pattern.